Man on a Plate

Winter sun. Just past the lunar equinox. Slack tides. I walk along the Thames path into town to buy On Grammatology by Jacques Derrida. Lost the previous copy.

In front of the old Billingsgate fish market I clamber down on to the foreshore.

Combing through the pebblebricks, gravel, shells, bones, pieces of clay pipe, fossils, plastic detritus and ceramic bits-and-pieces I notice a distinctive drift of cobalt blue Willow Pattern shards.

I squat, sift and notice a fragment with an image, I pick-it-up to inspect, rinse the gravel off and I see that in China there's a man on a river foreshore. I'm in a Borges story.

Read about related anthropocene walks, the Waste walk, Mudlark, and #floodplain