Bay Village Rollers

I spent a part of this morning down by the beach - it was a spring tide on a stormy day, and the view from above the promenade as the breakers marched in across the Irish Sea was profoundly exhilarating. Their continual crashing into the concrete of the prom had lifted a fair amount of the pebbled beach onto the walkway itself, and spray and spume were flying far across the greensward behind. While I watched, the tide heaved a great green contraption, possibly a septic tank, off the beach and onto the promenade itself, where it proceeded to make a shuffling progress along the concrete each time the waves returned. It must have been five feet high and eight in diameter, which gives some idea of the sheer strength of wave power when tide, coast and weather contrive violence. Not wanting to become the top story on News & Lookaround, I stayed well up the steps that descend to the promenade and watched the waves as they came in from the far horizon. Out on the main there seemed surprisingly little swell - what my father The Ancient Mariner would have described as 'nothing new', but he was a man for whom 80-foot waves in the winter North Atlantic were just another day at the office. I was left with a new respect for him in the face of this mayhem.
All of which heralds a return to blogging after an unusually prolonged silence - I've been down in London for most of 2007 renovating my flat, the tenants having left it in need of quite a lot of elements of refurbishment. My adventures in the world of interior decoration, South London stylee, will be appearing shortly in this very blog . . .