Winners Corner

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 We love Guernsey. We love our community, and we love having a bit of fun.

As a small local business, giving back has always been important to us. We’re not just here for our customers — we’re here for our community. We genuinely enjoy getting to know people, supporting local causes, and bringing a little extra excitement to island life.

If you follow us on social media, you’ll already know how much we enjoy running competitions. From giveaways to seasonal surprises, your incredible support and enthusiasm have made them bigger and better than we ever imagined. What started as a bit of fun has really taken off — and we couldn’t be more grateful. So, we’ve decided to create our Winners Corner — a special place to celebrate all of our competition winners and look back at the fantastic moments we’ve shared together.

Here you’ll find:

• 🎁 Our latest competition winners
• 📸 Snapshots of prize handovers and happy faces
• ⭐ A reminder of the fun we’ve had along the way
   

Every like, share, comment and entry means the world to us. Your support allows us to keep giving back and doing what we love. Keep an eye on our social pages — you never know when the next competition might pop up! Thank you for being part of our journey. Here’s to many more winners, laughs, and community moments to come. 🥂

The winner of our story writing competition and the winner of £100 cash prize and a £20 book token went to Oliver Brock for his amazing submission  titled "Solas - A memory of the sun."

SOLAS: A MEMORY OF THE SUN

Solas was twelve summers old when he first felt the sun after dark.

The camp had quieted for the night, the last firewood pushed into the lingering flame. The

smell of curing fish-skins and smoked grass drifted through the reed-thatched huts. A cold,

needling wind slipped off the sea, piercing sealskin cloaks and finding the softness beneath

one’s ribs. Restless, Solas slipped from the dozing adults and wandered into the dunes. He

liked it there, where gullies held the last daylight and sand remembered footprints. Barefoot,

he drifted without aim, chasing the fading warmth on his skin.

A flat stone lay half-buried near a knot of sea thrift, the same one he had sat on that

afternoon. He brushed his hand across it and flinched. The stone was warm, not faintly, but

living warm, as though something breathed inside it.

Pressing his palm harder, he felt the heat seep into him, slow and steady, like the stone had

stolen a piece of the sun and kept it safe beneath its skin.

Solas glanced at the pale shimmer where the sun had vanished. Why should a stone

remember the day when the day itself had already died?

He had no words for the question, but it settled in him like an ember. He picked up a smaller

pebble, warm against his skin, and slipped it into his pouch as if tucking away a secret.

In the years that followed, he kept the discovery to himself; language had not yet caught up

to the shape of the thought. The memory lived quietly in his hands, drawing him back to

stones again and again.

At first, it was a kind of play.

He gathered pebbles from the upper shore: smooth greys rounded by tides, flecked flints

from storms, pale granite speckled like frost. He arranged them on the earth in crooked lines

or senseless circles, pushed them close or far, buried some to their rims in sand and

perched others on sun-bleached slabs.

Most days, no one noticed. Hunters sharpened flint spears. Women cured hides with bone

needles and wove baskets. Other boys wrestled for strength. A few muttered about the

dreamy one lost in his stones, but he let their voices pass like wind across grass.

Patterns unfolded slowly: dark stones warmed quickest, heavy stones cooled slowest,

stones shielded from wind stayed warm longest, those resting on earth held heat deeper

than those on bare rock.

He did not think of it as knowing.

He thought of it as listening.

Sometimes he fell asleep beside his little clusters, waking when the chill returned. Other

times he carried a warmed pebble home in his palm until it cooled and became an ordinary

stone again. When his mother asked where he had been, he shrugged. How could he

explain that he was following warmth through the world?

Seasons turned.

Solas grew taller. His shoulders were narrow, his gaze wide. The habit of watching light

became the quiet spine of his days.

By his early twenties, the boy had become a gentle man. Not the strongest hunter nor the

fastest runner, but steady. He speared fish with patient aim, wove willow traps, built shelters

against winter winds. When he loved, he loved quietly and with his whole being.

When his first child was brought to him on a thin autumn day, Solas held her as though she

were made of light. They named her Lira. Her skin was warm against his chest, her breath

soft as a sparrow’s.

She was strong at first, bright-eyed, but the cold season came early one year, frost clinging

even to the sheltered hollows. Many in the camp coughed in their fur-lined beds; Lira

shivered through the nights.

Solas hardly slept. Her tiny hands were icy to his touch. Fires helped, but wood was scarce

and burned too quickly.

He remembered the stones.

The next morning, while the camp bustled with chores, sharpening tools and salting fish, he

placed dark, heavy stones in the brightest patch of sunlight.

At dusk, they stung his palms.

Wrapped in hide, he tucked them near Lira’s bedding.

All night he lay awake listening to her breathing. When dawn came, her skin was warm. Her

cough was quieter. She slept without stirring.

Relief broke over him like light across water.

His years of wandering had found their purpose.

After Lira’s illness, Solas gathered stones not for play, but for life.

Lira grew quick and confident, often trailing him along the coast. She learned to spot the

best stones first: the dark ones that drank the sun greedily, the smooth ones that warmed

fast but lost it quickly, the rough ones that held heat deep into the night. He often found her

arranging pebbles in rings or crescents, mirroring his movements with instinctive grace.

He began to work on a larger scale.

Fist-sized stones placed in earth-lined pits revealed that soil itself partnered with the sun,

slow to warm, slow to let go. Driftwood windbreaks kept warmth from fleeing. Rows of

stones angled toward the sinking sun revealed shadows that lengthened differently as

seasons turned.

The others watched him now, not with derision but a quiet curiosity. They did not grasp

everything he did, but they recognised the warmth his stones gave.

As his understanding grew, Solas shaped a shallow arc of heavy stones designed to catch

the last strength of the day’s light. Lira hauled stones twice her size, laughing as they rolled

them along the ground on lengths of driftwood. When they fitted a final slab, she pressed her

small hand to it and gasped at the heat.

“It holds the light!” she cried.

Solas brushed sand from her hair.

“No,” he said softly. “It remembers it.”

The sun trap was born.

By his early forties, Solas was an elder, weathered by wind, labour, and winter’s slow bite.

Still, he tended the trap each morning: brushing sand away, adjusting fallen screens,

greeting the light as it touched the stones.

Lira, grown now, walked with him, knowing his rhythms. The community no longer doubted

him; warmed stones were woven into daily life, easing joints, helping sleep, slowing the spoil

of food.

But Solas’ strength thinned as winter approached. A cough settled in his chest. Some days

he tired halfway to the trap, and Lira supported him with a firm hand under his elbow.

He never protested for long. He had never been proud of the wrong things.

In the final frost, he lay on a bed of skins by the hearth. Lira warmed stones for him as he

once had for her, placing them gently along his sides.

In the grey before dawn, with the first faint light touching the sky, Solas exhaled a long, quiet

breath, and did not take another.

Lira lowered her forehead to his chest, her tears warming the stones he had taught to

remember the sun.

The camp gathered silently at dawn.

Grief was simple, bowed heads, hands on shoulders. Solas had not sought notice in life, but

in death his absence left a shape in the air.

Lira lingered beside him long after the others drifted away. In her hand she held a cooled

stone from the night, smooth and dark, a shared memory.

When she rose, clarity settled over her like dawn light.

She walked toward the sun trap.

The stones brightened under the morning gold, warmth rising through her bare feet.

She knelt by the great central slab and rested her palm upon it.

“He should rest here,” she said when the others approached. “In the place he made. In the

light he learned to keep.”

It was not a plea or a command, simply a truth.

The elders hesitated.

One murmured that tradition called for burial by the sea.

Another touched the warmed stone beside him and nodded.

“Solas changed what we are,” he said. “Let this place honour him.”

One by one, they agreed.

Through the day, they transformed the trap into a chamber: lifting slabs with woven ropes

and driftwood levers, deepening the curve, placing standing stones to mark the turning of

seasons. Smaller rocks were fitted along the inner walls, ready to drink daylight and release

it long into the night.

Lira carried her father’s body herself.

She laid him upon the warmed stone bed as the sun dipped amber across the horizon.

Before the final slab was placed, she set the first warm pebble she had ever seen him carry

beside his hand.

“You taught the stones to hold the night,” she whispered.

“And now they will hold you.”

The chamber glowed softly as the sun vanished, warmth lingering like breath.

Seasons turned.

Grass thickened around the stones; sand filled their crevices. Children played near the

entrance without fear, for it was not a place of dread but of warmth, a shelter belonging to

everyone.

Lira visited often.

Sometimes alone.

Sometimes with those who sought comfort.

Most often with her own daughter, a small, curious child with Solas’ quiet patience in her

eyes.

One late autumn evening, as the sun dipped low across the water, Lira led her child into the

chamber. The amber glow rose from the warmed stones, holding the last of the day.

The girl knelt and pressed her palm to the central slab.

“It’s warm,” she whispered. “But the sun is gone.”

“The sun leaves its memory behind,” Lira said. “Your grandfather learned how to listen to it.”

The child traced a small spiral in the dust.

“Did he leave his memory too?”

Lira smiled, not sadly, but full of life.

“Yes,” she said. “The stones hold him. And the warmth he gave us lives on.”

Outside, the light slipped into the sea.

Inside, the stones glowed, quiet, faithful, carrying the warmth of the day and of the man who

first understood how to keep it