On Ampersands
Over the past couple of years I’ve got into the habit of making ampersands on beaches. It started on a whim, but I’ve kept at it and, o
Altro...
On Ampersands
Over the past couple of years I’ve got into the habit of making ampersands on beaches. It started on a whim, but I’ve kept at it and, o
Altro...On Ampersands
Over the past couple of years I’ve got into the habit of making ampersands on beaches. It started on a whim, but I’ve kept at it and, over that time, my thoughts on the subject have developed a little. Here are some of them.
https://daveybot.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/untitled-1.jpgThey set you up, your Mum & Dad
My Dad’s now retired, but he worked as a graphic designer, primarily in publishing, and often in educational books. If you went to a British school in the last forty years, there’s every chance you have used books that he designed. He retired from an industry and professional world dominated by computers – indeed, he’d been instrumental in bringing computers into one of the departments where he worked – but he’d originally learned his skills in a world without them.
He’s always appreciated the craft of making things, and my childhood home was scattered with old block type, book presses, enamel signs, posters, and other similar paraphernalia. He tried to instill an appreciation of such things in us kids, of course, and being kids, we mostly just rolled our eyes and attempted to avoid our friends’ questions when they asked why there was a big metal ampersand on the shelf over our fireplace, painted a bright copper green.
https://daveybot.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/ampersand-edited.jpg
My sisters and I grew up and left home. We all visit whenever we can, and we are lucky enough that everything about that place fills us with happiness. It is a running joke that the single thing we will definitely all fight over, when it eventually comes to the sad day of reading Dad’s will, is the ampersand.
Millions of beaches…
I grew up in a small village in Oxfordshire, and now live in the centre of Edinburgh. I much prefer living in the city, but we also have better access to coastline than I ever had growing up in the middle of southern England. And what a coastline! The shore of Scotland is about as interesting and beautiful and varied as you could ever hope to find. There are wide stretches of perfect unspoiled sand, tiny rocky coves, caves, bird-filled marshes, world heritage site bridges, fishing ports, oil refineries, power stations, cliffs, chain-supported walkways, famous geological formations that changed humanity’s understanding of time itself… honestly, it’s fantastic. I cannot enthuse enough.
And so when I drag my little family out for a walk, we often opt for the shore. In a land as soggy as Scotland, and particularly in the winter, beaches tend to be a lot less muddy than the woods! We’ve only just begun to explore, but we already have our favourite spots. One of them is Cockenzie / Port Seton, where you can grab a really good fish supper from the harbour cafe and eat while looking at the fishing boats. Then stroll along the shore and hop down onto one of the little beaches to skim stones or collect sea glass or admire the truly excellent variety of shells which wash up there. One sunny day the kids were collecting stones for painting faces on, my wife was seeing if she could find a complete rainbow of sea glass and shells, and I decided I’d arrange some pebbles. And I picked an ampersand, of course.
It took me about an hour, and I found it to be a very pleasing way of passing the time. Some of the people also enjoying that calm little cove on that warm sunny day also seemed to like it, which came as a bit of a surprise, but a pleasing one! So the next time we were at the beach, I did it again.
And then again. And again…
There’s something about the exercise of making these little glyphs that I confess I find rather pleasing. You pick your materials, you pick your site, and then you keep making an ampersand until either you or your family get bored, or the tide catches up with you! You can let your thoughts focus on something that will soon be completed. You can create something which serves no purpose other than a brief bit of aesthetic pleasure, that celebrates nothing more than the physical stuff that was already there, and the brief intervention of a human who likes to arrange objects into recognisable forms.
They’re never very big. I always make them from elements found in the direct vicinity, and I always make them below the high tide line so I know they’ll be destroyed within hours (often minutes!) of their completion.
My patience and attention to detail on these are limited, and that’s absolutely intentional. I want them to be fleeting and ephemeral, and if I ever end up feeling stressed about making a better one then I will have forgotten their purpose. But I suspect that I am still, nevertheless, getting somehow better at it? You learn how to spot the best likely materials. You get to know the textures and colours of the shells a little better, you judge realistic sizes a bit more effectively, you think a little more about what will actually look interesting… It’s an odd one, I can admit, but this has somehow become a hobby.
…And most of the time, when I’m gathering and arranging these components into these forms, it’s just that practical task on which I let my mind focus. But of course over time I’ve also come to ponder on the interesting nature of the ampersand itself.
Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion
The ampersand is a bit of an odd thing, really. Others have written about them at length, so I won’t go into its near 2,000-year history here. But isn’t it rather great that this simple, single glyph, is so widely understood? All sorts of languages with Latin roots will have different spelled words for ‘and’, but they all use the ampersand in the same way. It’s not unique by any means – punctuation marks and numbers work pretty similarly – but I still really like it.
It’s also pretty great that a symbol so universally understood also comes in so many different forms. Again, plenty of other glyphs also do this, but the various forms that an ampersand can take are particularly diverse, and I love that about it, too.
https://daveybot.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/ampersands.jpgAnd finally, there is the meaning of the ampersand itself: ‘And’. It is inclusive by its very nature, and that’s no small thing. We don’t have a glyph anywhere near as universally understood or commonly used which means ‘but’ or ‘not’. No, the ampersand sees and shows the value in including others.
What a wonderful thing, eh? It’s almost universally understood, it’s diverse in its own presentation, and it’s inclusive by its very nature. I think it’s a symbol we can all get behind.
My sisters and I will still probably continue to enjoy the fight over our Dad’s ampersand. But like his love of design, it appears I might already have inherited something of it, anyway.
I share them as I make them, on Flickr and Mastodon. Join me!
