I’m wondering whether my pictures need
context, whether I should write more about me, or about the subject matter of
the pictures rather than letting them speak for themselves. So here goes.
Yesterday we go to the sea for the first
time for ages. We used to go every other weekend (approximately speaking) but
somehow recently there have always been Things To Do.
Frog comes to the top of the cliff and then
goes back to the car: not only does he still have a hacking cough (as a result
of the cold/flu he suffered over Christmas) but he also has a bad (arthritisy?
gouty?) foot. Ellie and I continue along the cliff path and then back through
the undercliff and down the beach, and because we don’t have Frog with us we can
linger. (He thinks lingering on the beach is a waste of time – he just
wants to get to the end of the walk.)
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| Sorry for the tilted horizon, but aren't the angles lovely |
Apart from some fisherman (to whom Ellie
just has to run and say hello), we have this
end of the beach to ourselves. The air is so clear I can see from one side of
Lyme Bay to the other. The sun is warm on my face. The sea, although slightly
murky from all the bad weather, is only lightly rippled with waves. I am almost
tempted to strip off and dive in. The only sea-like smell however comes from a nearby
pile of seaweed.
This is the beach off which the container
ship Napoli grounded and lost her
cargo in 2006. A whole new batch of twisted lumps of metal, brought in by the storms,
decorates the back of the beach. Frog used to collect these remains as
trophies, identifying them as he went. ‘Ooh, here’s a car window-winding
mechanism . . . spare-wheel mounting bracket . . . wing harness clip . . .
blanking plug . . .’ His collection now sits outside the back door in a plastic crate.
Ellie does her share of beachcombing,
coming back with a plastic water bottle which she crunches for all of two
seconds. She then sits beside me, pretending to be quiet and obedient, but
unable to keep her usual rebellious expression off her face.
This is the Jurassic Coast where (as I
understand it) sixty million years of geological remains are arranged in vertical stripes (because the land has tilted). In the picture above, and this one
below, the cliffs are chalky and white.
If I look the other way however, the cliffs
are red sandstone.
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| Another wonky horizon and more lovely angles |
We trudge back along the shingle and arrive at the busy end of the beach, where children and their parents play in a stream which debouches into the sea. I don’t
like to tell them it comes from a sewage works less than a mile away, but
I suppose the water is clean.
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| Spot the dog |
The tideline is almost up to the carpark –
I’ve never seen it so high – but I can’t
take a photograph as I’m too busy trying to put Ellie on the lead in order to
stop her going up to everyone to say
hello. One man is busy snapping a tree which the water has planted upside down
in the shingle.
And so back to the car, where Frog – I
discover to my relief – has been perfectly happy listening to ‘Pick of the Pops’
with Tony Blackburn.
A perfect end to a perfect day.
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