Oh, to be 9 again…

Last weekend we had the delight of hosting my 9 year old niece, Scarlett, for a couple of nights.
It was my first sleepover with one of my cherished niblings and we had a super, super time.

We went to Hastings Pride after a rich conversation about its origins and the importance of continuing to fight for inclusion and equity. Scarlett had made us all personalised bracelets to wear to the march – you can see mine at the top of this post.

Scarlett has the clear and unshakeable sense of justice that comes from being 1. an eldest child and 2. a nine year old. She’s currently reading Fantastically Great Women who Changed the World which gave us a great framework for understanding historic injustice, and how key figures have led radical and important social change. If you have amazing recommendations for children’s books for the 8 – 12 age range that explore the history of Pride and which represent the LGBTQ+ community well for this age group, please put them in the comments – I did look online ahead of Scarlett’s visit, but it’s hard to know which are the best books from just a photo of the cover and a handful of reviews.

After following the Pride parade, we caught the last day of Black Joy – the magnificent exhibition put together by Playing The Race Card.

Playing The Race Card was founded by Claudine Eccleston and is led by a Working Group of community members with support from local arts charity Home Live Art. The Black Joy exhibition was curated by Lorna Hamilton-Brown RCA, MBE. It featured work by 46 Black artists from the South East, all exploring the theme of Black Joy in different ways and through different media. It opened on Saturday 4th May and ran until Sunday 25th August 2024 in Hastings Museum. Alongside the exhibition, there’s been a glorious outreach programme. I’m sad it’s come to an end; it’s been like a lighthouse in this town, beaming joy; sparking vital conversations and connections; building community.

There is so much more to say about this exhibition, but for this post I’ll just share that it was incredibly special to be able to share it with my niece before it was taken down. Scarlett especially loved the use of Ghanaian sand in the large painting by Rahim Amartey, and the shining gold leaf in this beautiful charcoal drawing – We Are Art – by Michael K Davis.

Later on Sunday we had lunch with Mark’s eldest son, Jack, and then took the train home (7 minutes from Hastings to West St. Leonards!) and played Paint Chip Poetry. This wonderful game is the invention of Lea Redmond – one of my favourite artists. You pick out twelve paint chips plus a prompt card, then make poems out of the paint chips – or play in any other way that you wish – to express/explore the given prompt. It’s creative and non-competitive, and we had the best fun making up poems.

It is incredibly refreshing to hang out with a young person who needs no prompting to PLAY and who has no perfectionism to overcome; in fact, I’d say that the spontaneity and delight of PLAYING WITH A YOUNG PERSON might be THE BEST FUN, EVER.

Relatedly, on Monday I took Scarlett to the beach at low tide.
You know I LOVE my beach at low tide. With Scarlett, I learned that the only thing better than going to the sea at low tide, is going with someone who is AS EXCITED AS I AM ABOUT HOW AMAZING IT IS.

We arrived in time for the low tide, and also in time for a swift and heavy summer shower. Undaunted and swinging her clear bucket (for shells) Scarlett determinedly walked forth into the driving rain, stating THE RAIN WON’T DAMPEN OUR DAY! The sun was soon out again and a warm wind, drying our soaked clothes, as we foraged between the tree trunks, the pools, the silt and the sand, for treasure.

The little clear bucket was quickly filled and several careful edits were required as Scarlett ruefully acknowledged that WE CAN’T TAKE EVERY SHELL.

I showed her the piddock burrows made in the soft silty clay slowly forming from the decaying forest that now forms the ocean floor…

…she told me everything she had learnt so far in school, regarding sedimentary rocks and how they are formed.

Our walk across the light and space of the beach was exuberant and joyful, and we marvelled at the bucket on a stick that is the gauge Mark and I use to try and understand the water levels. At low tide, you can stand at its base, while at high tide, only the top 20-30cm plus the bucket can be seen poking out of the sea. When the tide is low, you are granted access, temporarily, to a vast space that mostly belongs to the ocean. I will never get over how magic it feels to temporarily inhabit the water’s space, and I loved sharing it with Scarlett – who totally understands this specialness.

On our way home from a cheese and ham toasties lunch at the Oceanside Cafe, we picked up lots of plastic that didn’t belong in the sea and put it in the bin (apart from one cool piece, which I kept, because it looks like a tiny hut).

On our return, we washed the special shells and took time to paint some of them in different and fun ways. Some we painted with thermochromic pigments, so that when they are plunged into hot water or squeezed in the palm of your hand, they turn from green and purple to soft pink and bright pink. Some we gilded with copper leaf, revealing all the textures of the shells and imparting a glowy, metallic joy. Still more shells we painted with The Blackest Black by Stuart Semple. Scarlett was especially pleased with the effect of painting the outside of an oystershell with this paint, so that one side is extremely matt and black, making a dramatic contrast with the gleaming pearlescent interior of that shell. With fimo, we created pretend pebbles and ammonites, inspired by the colours of our beach finds. All this play was an attempt to celebrate the wondrous treasures of the sea, and our experiences of exploring it together.

Kind Uncle Mark made Scarlett’s favourite dinner – Carbonara – enabling us to maximise our creative afternoon, while little Frida attempted to solicit fuss and head-pets from our guest.

All too soon, it was time for all Scarlett’s things to be packed away into her tiny rucksack and suitcase, and for the shells to be layered in bubblewrap in her bucket for their homeward journey and a special show-and-tell later, for her younger siblings. On one of the mornings when I’d felt especially slow and tired, I invited Scarlett to do an exercise from my Colour at Play course, and create some colour matches. She pulled some cards from my lovely deck of Spirit Cat cards, and matched colours to them from the Paint Chip Poetry game.

As we never got to play with the beautiful palettes she made during this stay, I’ll print them out and put them in a letter. In this and other ways, I hope that we can keep the joy of this visit going for a while yet.

It’s such a special thing to be an Auntie and it means so much to be trusted and allowed to share some of the things that are important to me with my niece.

Curiosity, hopefulness and a deep sense of justice are things we share when we look at the world… and so too are creativity and a joyous and abundant sense of PLAY. At times, the sheer energy of a nine year old skipping in my home and telling me about ALL THE THINGS made me aware of how old and creaky I feel but, mostly, hanging out with Scarlett reminded me of everything that is truly wonderful about being young.

Please come back again soon, dear one xxx