Beach-Combing Journal: Globs and Prunts
On Hot Glass, Greasy Fingers, and Soap-Bubbles
Overcast sky. Diagonal shadow-stripes of rain at the horizon. I walked down to the sea and saw this shining in the wet pebbles.1 Flat on both faces, it’s the nipped-off end of a glass-blower’s molten glasswork. (The hot glass can be snipped with metal shears.)
As I walked along holding it in my hand I remembered how when I was messing around with glassblowing,2 the first thing I ever tried making was this exact shade of ultramarine: it was a misshapen little shot glass.
(Hot glass is all about fluent timing: liquid decision-making, swift skill. As a beginner, it’s difficult to make anything good. Molten glass doesn’t want to stay spread out and symmetrical, it wants to droop towards gravity at any spin-glitch, and is constantly seeking to suck its edges into itself again. Return to sphere!)
This is not the first of these glass globs I’ve found on the beach. I’ve found at least four or five others over the last decade or so. They’re easily distinguishable from marbles, being flattened on at least one side, and oddly-sized and shaped.
(They’re a hard thing to photograph well. The brown has fine stripes of yellow and white. The red and white globs have opaque and translucent white swirled together, exactly as shell-spires and shell-hinges do when they’re worn down to nubs. The red and white together remind me of bandages, and of Winter hunting— falcons and rabbits— blood on the snow.3)
Rubbing the glass nugget between my fingers, I remembered, too, being in a beautiful wooden house in the Aro Valley (Douglas and Guthrun’s; being in that house felt like stepping four or five hundred years back in time) and drinking wine out of a hand-blown, hollow-stemmed glass goblet covered in decorative lumps of glass, beautiful to the touch. Most things have a name, and after some searching of things like ‘Dutch still life goblet’ and ‘Handblown glass goblet lumps’, I found out their name: they are prunts, and a glass that has them is a prunted glass.
Prunted glasses, as far as I can tell, were made in Europe from the 1200s through to the 1600s.4 There was a practical reason for the prunts, as well as the pleasure of fondling: Mediaeval people ate with their hands5, and texture made a glass easier to get a grip on with greasy and / or drunken paws. (Candlelight on glass, musicians playing. Glass must have been magical back in the day, before industrialisation rendered it mundane.)
The process of glass-making is thought to have been discovered prior to 3500BC in Mesopotamia6 (or maybe Egypt: nobody is certain), likely as a by-product of metal-working. In ancient times, glass was so precious.7 A material for jewellery. But by the twentieth century, so common. Ubiquitous, even. In the Anthropocene— now— so old-school: nostalgic, virtuous, superior to plastic. (A glass milk bottle beaded with condensation.)
Glass is a slippery material, though. A solid liquid, so that a pane wavers and sinks in its frame over time. It prompts ambivalence.8 When I consider what I don’t love, it’s the unnaturalness; the sometimes-garish colours, the uncanny transparency. Unfading, unrusting. It’s not stone, or wood. It's not ceramic, which in fragments reveals its true nature as honest dirt. It’s more like metal, in that it can be infinitely melted and remade; but it’s not strong in the same way metal is, it has no bounce, no resilience.
Beach-glass surfaces become frosted, salted, the colours bright only when wet. (The joyfulness of the jewel colours, that stand out on the sunlit beach even in tiny fragments.9 Bright and holy: a cathedral window. Bright and cheap: a marble.)
Glass is made of beach-stuff— sand transmogrified— and by being at the beach long enough, it is slowly, patiently rendered back to sand.
One reason there's so much glass at my beach— bottles, marbles, and these strange glass-blower’s off-casts— is the dump upstream. One of the best things I ever found at the Dump Shop was this little glass, which carries the story of its origins engraved onto itself.10 Light as eggshell, it was sitting among the other drinking glasses on the shelf, at the standard price of $1.
It’s an object like a soap-bubble, floating through the decades— almost a century! miraculously unpopped.11 Glass is so vulnerable, at risk from children, flatmates, dishwashing, earthquakes. Lessons in non-attachment. One of my first conversations with my friend Beth was at a party in a big wooden hall. She was wearing her skeleton suit. We were talking about the relative perils of letting go too easily vs. holding on too tightly. I said "Imagine that the glass is already broken,”12 and between the two syllables of the word broken, a dropped glass smashed across the room.13
Surprisingly often when I’m beach-combing I find something straight away, the minute I step onto the shore.
At Design School, last century.
And this song: The Voice Squad ~ Banks of the Bann
Her cheeks were like roses, or blood-drops in snow.
A video, with no sound, showing how prunts are made:
Medieval Glass: Making prunts
As well as with spoons and knives.
Like writing, and farming.
Precious even until quite recently: I’m thinking of the small glass windowpanes in Little House on the Prairie. I often think about another story in those books, where the little girls watch the roof-building to see when a nail is dropped, and then hunt for it in the grass, because nails are valuable and nigh-on irreplaceable.
The reason I didn’t continue messing around with it: I wasn’t in love with it, as a material.
However, the vast majority of beach glass is bits of booze bottle- green, amber, and clear.
Soap-bubbles: a classic vanitas motif. Death blowing bubbles with a reed and a scallop shell full of soapy water.
Ajahn Chah: "You see this goblet? For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, 'Of course.' When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious."
Pop!
Lovely 🤩 One of my fave 99% Invisible podcast episodes (other than the one with Caroline Criado-Perez about her insanely good book called “Invisible Women”) was the one on sand. Made me buy another audio book called “The world in a grain” which I haven’t listened to yet. It is marvelous and precious indeed. So sad it’s now both mundane and yet another reason we’re destroying our planet.
Harmonies of "The Voice Squad" - precious as antique glass. Thank you for letting me discover that.