Misty

Over the last few days, I've had a few ideas for my first century blip. All of them, however, involved daylight. So it was a bit of a shock to wake up in Dorset this morning and find that there wasn't any!

Undeterred, we set off for the beach at Charmouth, where I thought I might find some jurassic coast ammonites that could come in useful. I was surprised to find that the cliffs have crumbled considerably, following the harsh winters of 2009 and 2010, and the more recent heavy rainfall. Falling rocks, mudslides, and even deaths of onlookers have occurred. The cliffs here are black and clayey, all churned up, and reminded me of:
1) the black cliffs at Houlgate, in Normandy, known as 'les vaches noires'
2) the building of the motorway (M8?) that I witnessed, week upon week, in the 1970s.

The light was poor, and apart from some folk handily dressed in jelly-baby coloured cagoules, there was nothing much that was bright or cheerful. A dog was tussocking around on the shore, but was the same colour as the sand. There were no ammonites. Tess observed that the tide was coming in at great speed, so we turned around and headed back to the village, where I bought some hangover/sinus remedies that have - sort of - worked.

Burton Bradstock was our next beach stop, where we ate expensive hake and chips in the award-winning Hive beach cafe, which was full of Boden catalogue people and yummy mummies. I seemed to have brought the poshtershire people and the fog of Gloucestershire with me! Never mind, we enjoyed the tempura temptations and the bracing walk along the beach and cliffs that followed. I was quite taken by the singer Billy Bragg's clifftop house, but decided that I might need a cleaner if I were ever to live in a dwelling of that size...

Later, we parked up the van on the estate where Tess and her partner run the community resource and recycling centre, Bridport TLC. Leon fetched us a coffee and I re-made the acquaintance of their head of security and chief ratcatcher, a cat called General. General used to live next door to us in Stroud; a vicious rescue cat that could not settle to domesticity. He was also suffering from being named Gentle! Several years ago, Tess happened to visit us in Stroud and asked if we knew of a good hunting cat that needed rehoming. By the following evening, Gentle had been rehomed and renamed, and now loves hanging out with Leon and the volunteer lads on the recycling project on the Victorian industrial estate.

We are relaxing again with another glass of the red stuff, and today's techno problems are more easily dealt with than yesterday's. I've also ordered a camera connection kit for the iPad, so that next time I go away for a day or two I won't have to take the laptop and the iPad, as well as the camera. That should lighten the load...

The Misty song: