12th September from the West Cliff Green, Bournemouth
The sun comes through a layer of bubbly grey cloud. It is late summer warm but all day the sun is veiled by thin high layers which casts a peculiar subdued light on the day. The smooth, almost flat sea is a strange tawny colour. The shadows are muted. Many little fishing boats dot the bay, making good use of the calm weather and the spring tides. Crows croak from the tree tops. A large white butterfly flits from flower to flower. In several places soft downy pigeon feathers are stuck in the fence wire.
From September 12th 2019
From where I am, I can see the boundaries that define the world. The cliff edge where the sky meets the land, the tide-line where the land meets the sea and the horizon where the sea meets the sky. And on occasions the strict cloud edge where a weather front move up channel. These are sharp, definite delineations. Thresholds over which the elements may only stray with catastrophic consequences. Our perception is drawn by edges. We focus on edges and our brains fill in the rest of the view with smudges and hazy awareness. The horizon is the only straight edge in nature and it provides endless fascination. it takes movement across an edge to show us something we ought to pay attention to, perhaps the distant sail of a Viking raider. So these big unbroken edges become regular and somehow reassuring. We are defined by edges. We divide up our lives with precision looking for the exact moments where summer becomes autumn, or one life ends and another begins. We are here and then there.Where edges become difficult to discern we become alert, trying to pick out the movements of something we should pay attention to. Trying to interpret meaning from an edgeless world. Among the pine trees we cannot tell whether that shadow is a sun dapple or the movement of something dangerous. Our need to define edges and the stripes of a tiger represent a battle for supremacy that has continued for tens of thousands of generations. And even among friends this need to perceive edges and thresholds can lead to disputations and civil wars. Sometimes it may be better to pause and examine the smudgy, hazy world between the battle lines and understand that the demarcations between us are only a trick of perception and that not all our fears turn out to be tigers.
From September 12th 2018
When the wind's in that direction and there's cloud cover to reflect the sound (as today) the boom of the tank guns and the chatter of the tracer fire from the Lulworth Ranges can be heard quite clearly in Bournemouth. As with many things, Thomas Hardy heard it first many years ago. (Channel Firing)
From September 12th 2017
We're only on the edge of Storm Aileen here but the tempest is terrific. The sea is clawing and spitting like an angry tiger. The clifftop trees are whipping and lashing casting weird dancing shadows in the little patches of street lights. I am leaning against the wind and sometimes the gusts punch the air out of my lungs. The noise is tremendous. I feel warm and dry inside my storm coat but my trousers are wet and clinging to my legs. I can only look down at a few inches of path in front of me and let my hood take the battering from the steely rain. Then the SAR helicopter thrashes past and into the blackness. I think: "There are some courageous men and women in the world." And then: "Some poor bastard is out there..."
