21st March from the West Cliff Green, Bournemouth
The wind is snappy and cold even though it is coming from the south. The gulls are riding high, swerving and swooping on th the updraughts against the white and grey lumpy clouds. There are occasional signs of blue. But it doesn’t feel very spring-like. Flowers that were fully open yeasterday are closed up tight. The bright yellow stick of a crane on the Riviera bulding site stretches way up into the firmament as if in compensation. The sea is busy rushing on but never seeming to get anywhere. A party of multicoloured town pigeons are visiting today. They have a mean and hungry look and huddle together as if uncertain of what sort of welcome they will get here. Our own wood pigeons are fat and robust and eat from the grass like a party of potentates feasting in a grand banquet.
From 21st March 2022
The breeze has dropped to a whisper. The sun is warm in a milky, blue sky but there is a hazy mist that fills the spaces between the trees and trails across the bay. The three sided leeks, our version of wild garlic, is spreading its heady scent across the ground between the rhododendrons. A quiet day, but concentrate and the whole of the West Cliff is alive with sound. Of course, the rush and sigh of the surf, the distant squabbling and keening of the gulls, the continual overlapping of the song of small birds, croaking magpies. But keep listening; the distant buzz of a helicopter out in the haze somewhere, the throb of a fishing boat, someone hammering on the building site below the cliffs. Voices laughing. But all of this faint and dispersed so that you are hardly aware of the rich and complex soundscape that surrounds you. #Bournemouth #westcliffgreen #spring #march
From 21st March 2021
Bournemouth is a town built on sand. Our seven (or is it eight?) miles of sandy beaches have been attracting visitors for two hundred years. They are, apparently, the finest beaches in Southern England, Or Europe. Or the world. Depending on how you judge these things. But the sands also protect the town from the steadily rising sea. Without them, the waves would soon be gnawing at our fragile cliffs. So, the sand is being renourished. Two dredgers are shuttling backwards and forwards from the mysterious Area 501 in the middle of the North Sea bringing us their golden bounty. Massive iron tubes connect the dredgers (Willem Van Oranje and the Scheldt River) to the shore which disgorge their nourishment rather like an enormous Herring Gull disgorging its lunch for its young. And indeed, a crowd of gulls are mad with excitement paddling in the slurry delighted by the North Sea treats it contains.
From 21st March 2016
The old long case clock is ticking again. It was made in 1806, 5 years before Jane Austen published Sense and Sensibility, George the Third was still on the throne, Napoleon had been beaten at Trafalgar the year previously but was still causing trouble, Wordsworth finished the first version of The Prelude and so on. It is a humble country clock made in Alresford Hants with a painted dial and has been in my family for at least a hundred and fifty years. It will go on to Holly when I die. It is amazing to be part of such a chain and how I love lying in bed hearing its steady beat throughout the night, friendly, reassuring. Let us applaud clock-makers because clocks are more than the measure of our time on earth.
