In my blog of 24th Feb I was moaning about rubbish, particularly plastic, and the damage it causes to sea wildlife and more generally. This one isn’t going to be too cheery either. Someone on the radio recently said that he thought it was “hubris” to think that humans are affecting planet Earth. What a load of nonsense that view is! All you have to do is look around you and sniff the air to detect our effect, and pretty much every day the news tells us of some new problem: a species dying out, an oil tanker run aground, a glacier melting that shouldn’t be, bumble bees dying unexpectedly, deforestation, insufficient recycling, etc. etc. The common factor in all of these is us humans doing things to the planet that cause devastation on smaller or larger scales.

The problems that will be faced by the next few generations will be serious and hard to handle: overpopulation, high levels of population, diminishing supplies of fresh water, increasing cost of food, risk of global conflict with “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and so on and so on. We are handing future generations a poisoned chalice.

As individuals, there is little we can do on a global scale: an ant cannot deflect an an elephant. But if enough ants get together they can make a difference and for their small stature, ants are relatively very strong.. There is much we can do (and this is only a very small list):

Recycle more
Turn our heating down by 1 degree and wear a jumper,
Walk and cycle for short journeys
Use more public transport
Buy more efficient vehicles
Use energy saving light bulbs
Avoid buying over packaged produce
Try and buy local produce
Eat less meat
Write to your government representatives and tell them how you feel

This last one is perhaps the most important. If governments don’t know what the public think, they won’t be doing the right things.

My mum arrived as planned, and we had a lovely walk on the beach with the dogs and a lovely reddish sunset that looked quite a lot like the one above (perhaps not a delight for shepherds as it‘s a grey day this morning!). We’ll be having a nice long look round the shops in Aberystwyth soon.

Cheers, Tom.

My broadband connection has been playing up for the last couple of days, but thankfully it appears to have settled down now. It would just randomly stop working every couple of minutes and then magically come back again. The phone was crackling too, and sometimes the dial tone would disappear.

My experience with BT support wasn’t particularly helpful. I called them up, listened to their introductory spiel and then did an automatic test of the line. Hooray I thought - they test the line automatically, and log the fault for me. This did sort of happen. It identified a fault “within your house” and I got put into a queue to wait for an “adviser” which sounds like someone you talk to when you apply for a mortgage, but I digress. I waited 10 minutes and eventually got through.

The “adviser” cheerfully informed me that he couldn’t help me, but he knew exactly who could. So, I was transferred to their call centre in Calcutta. I spoke to a very polite and helpful woman for about an hour. But unfortunately, her accent was so strong that almost everything she said I needed to have repeated. This was compounded by the intermittent crackling on the line so that when she did say things that I would be able to understand, it was drowned out by the crackles. My frustration levels sky-rocketed. I was asked what type of broadband router I had, then to turn it off and back on again, undo all of the cables and plug them back in again, etc, all of which had me crawling around under the stairs getting filthy, with the phone perched painfully between my neck and head. I swear I must have looked like Quasimodo.

Next, she asked me to unscrew the BT plate from the wall and of course I hadn’t thought to bring a screwdriver to the phone - who would? So, she said she could give me a number to ring where they’d be able to help me. I bet you can guess what that number was, can’t you? Yup, it was the BT fault reporting number that I had rung originally. So back in a queue again to wait for an “adviser”. So I had to explain everything that had happened and they were most apologetic, checked on their system and told me that the fault had been identified as being in my house and I could either arrange for a BT engineer to visit, or not.

Great I thought, progress! Then I was informed that if either no fault could be found or if the fault was with my “equipment” then there was a £115 call-out charge and a further charge of £99 per hour of work. So hang on, I thought to myself. I have an intermittent problem. If the engineer arrives and it all works perfectly, I get landed with a bill for over £200 quid and the problem might still be there. And just at this moment, the phone crackled and went dead. And then 5 seconds later came back on again. I took this as a sign from beyond and arranged for the engineer. Then for the rest of the day and again this morning it’s been perfect. Not even a glitch and I’ve been streaming videos from youtube constantly. With panic levels rising at the thought of £200 for nothing I checked on BT’s website and saw that it’s 24 hours notice required to cancel the engineer, and it was now only 23. So I got straight on the phone, entered the queue for an adviser and managed to get it cancelled. And word for word, this is what the man said: “Good thing you told us, you’d have been charged for the call-out if we couldn’t find a problem”.

So, I think we can call this a learning experience. If the intermittent problem comes back, I will try and find some local, cheap, freelance telephony engineer, phone them up from my mobile and say “can you please come have a look” and that will hopefully be it.

The picture is Dan saying “Please throw the ball for me again, Tom”! It seemed appropriate, somehow!

Cheers, Tom.

Last night, Helen and I watched the absolutely brilliant Japanese film Tokyo Story, directed by Yasujiro Ozu and made in 1953. It tells the tale of an elderly couple from an outlying town who come to Tokyo to visit their children who all now have their own families, but when they get there the children are too busy to spend much time with them. It’s such a simple and beautifully told tale, and done completely unmelodramatically. Everything in the film appears to be taken directly from life: petulant children, having too much to do, losing sight of the important things.

By coincidence, my mum is visiting Helen and I tomorrow. Sometimes I really do wonder if there is more going on than simple coincidence. I’m not thinking of a god because I don’t think there is one, but some sort of subconscious process that makes us do things at certain times and that controls us in ways we can neither understand nor control. Sometimes, life seems to be full of these accidental circumstances.

The picture above is something I just noticed early one morning: a real bird on top of the pole and a fake one at the bottom. I wonder if that means anything?

Cheers, Tom

When I bought a digital camera recently, it got me thinking about the subject of digital copies. Not just of photographs, but of music and films as well. In the good old days, a film was a tangible thing, something physical. Making copies meant you had to have your hands on the negative. Records could be copied, but only by playing them back and recording them onto tape with resulting loss of quality. Then along came digital CDs and DVDs and it all changed: you could get a perfect copy every time from any instance of the media. Now it’s even simpler - a file on your computer can be copied by anyone on the internet, if you choose to allow them. This should be a subject to be considered by anyone creatively using a digital format: photographers, film-makers, musicians, artists.

But is this stealing, or perhaps a better question would be is it fair? Is it moral? The copying of MP3s was stamped on hard a few years ago when the band Metallica kicked up a fuss about their music being swapped for free on the internet and this famous quote was made by them:

"If you won't be a fan of Metallica because we won't let you download our music for free, then fine, we don't want you as a fan”

The result was the shut-down of many file-sharing sites, and now lots of people pay for downloading songs. Now, the film industry is starting to kick hard about the same issue, and of live streaming of films.

When something is digital, it’s intangible, non-physical - you can’t point to the hard disk of your computer and say “there it is, that’s the film”. Technically, according to the letter of the law in many countries, copying such data isn’t theft because the original owner hasn’t been deprived of it; it is copyright infringement, not theft. If I was able to wave a magic wand and make an identical copy of your car, you still have your car: I haven’t stolen it. But consider this example:

I am a professional photographer and I have a stall where I sell prints of my photographs. You come along with your digital camera, snap one of my pictures and print copies of it. You set up a stall next to mine giving away copies of my picture for nothing. Not surprisingly, my business drops.

Is this fair? Technically the people taking those free copies haven’t stolen, but I have suffered a very real loss of my trade. This is the argument the film industry is using and I have to say that it does carry a lot of weight.

Of course, there is a counter-argument: those accepting the free copies wouldn’t have bought them anyway, and some people will still pay for the originals. Some people might even seek out more of my work because of the publicity of the free copies.

But there is a basic question that is normally side-stepped by people who do such illegal downloading and it’s this:

Why do they think they are entitled to the product of someone else’s hard work for free?

Or more personally:

Tell me why you think you are entitled to my work for free?

I see three major problems with the way things are going:

1. People think they are entitled to things for free these days. They think that someone else’s hard work and effort should be theirs for free. This sense of entitlement is spreading and I think it's a very bad thing.

2. People associate (rightly or wrongly) price with value. If something is free, it is thus devalued. When I was a kid I used to save up money to buy records and I treasured them. This doesn’t happen any more and I don't want to see a world where films and music become valueless because you can get them for nothing.

3. What of the future: If any art can be gained for free, why should it be made at all? What's the point of me going to the trouble of spending months recording an album or making a film if I don‘t get paid for doing it? Being a struggling artist and doing it for love is all very well and romantic, but sometimes artists have mouths to feed and bills to pay.

Interestingly, I believe this issue was first mentioned by the artist Pablo Picasso in the late 1940s. Very far-sighted chap.

If you want to, feel free to copy the above picture. I don’t mind!

Cheers, Tom.

The beach is just over the wall to the left in the above picture. When summer comes along, the whole road will be lined with parked cars and camper vans. Coaches, cars and motorcycles will be fighting to get through to their temporary resting places where they will disgorge their occupants for their days of fun at the seaside.

I’m looking forward to my first summer here very much. Kids playing with buckets and spades, happy faces eating ice creams, drunken bikers singing loudly as they totter back to their camp-sites, but most of all the long evenings watching the sun sink into the sea whilst sipping a fine wine and listening to some good music. But for now, the emptiness has a pleasing feel about it. Not only is the street empty, but the beach mostly is as well.

It feels like the end of the world here sometimes and that appeals to me at the moment. This morning is totally windless, and the sea is the calmest I think I have seen it so far. No proper waves, just a gentle up and down motion.

Cheers, Tom..

Please, don’t drop rubbish on the beach

Litter and rubbish are problems for all of us in these modern times. The packaging that food and other products come in often amounts to far more than the thing it contains. I find it quite despicable for example that you can go to a supermarket and buy one single apple on a Styrofoam tray with the whole thing shrink-wrapped. An apple comes in it’s own natural skin - why wrap a 2nd plastic one round it, when that plastic will just go into a land-fill or even worse into the sea? If you need to wrap it more, how about a recyclable paper bag?

But litter is even more of a problem on the beach than it is in cities. It is more visible and hence more ugly, but the more serious problem is that it gets washed into the sea and causes huge problems for many types of wildlife. Links to three articles on the problem are below.

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http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/the-worlds-rubbish-dump-a-garbage-tip-that-stretches-from-hawaii-to-japan-778016.html

“A "plastic soup" of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said”

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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/steve-connor-why-plastic-is-the-scourge-of-sea-life-778017.html

“The scale and extent of the plastic pollution he has uncovered is staggering. Nineteen out of every twenty dead fulmars analysed by his team from around the North Sea had scraps of plastic in their stomachs.

Each bird had swallowed an average of 44 pieces of plastic, weighing a total of 0.33 grams (see table below). One poor fulmar from Belgium had ingested a massive 1,603 pieces, while another from Denmark had 20.6 grams of plastic in its stomach - equivalent to two kilos in a human-sized stomach”

http://www.robedwards.com/2004/12/seabirds-filled.html

“One cigarette lighter, a toothbrush, a toy robot and a tampon applicator. The list of plastic items recovered from the stomach of a Laysan albatross chick that died on a remote Pacific island reads like a random assortment of everyday household objects”

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Please, don’t drop rubbish on the beach! Even better, pick some up and put it in a bin.

Cheers, Tom..

There is a caravan park quite close to here, where people come and stay for the week. It has hundreds of caravans, has it’s own bar and swimming pool, and is situated slightly less than 5 minutes walk from the beach. Yet, quite a lot of people never leave the site for the whole week of their stay. There is a shop, a bar, a pool, and play areas for children. A friend overheard someone from the park saying “we don‘t go to the beach much because there‘s nothing there for the kids to do“. Erm, excuse me?

This attitude confuses me. They come to the seaside for a holiday and then stay on their camp-site and don’t even see the sea. It’s like going to a football match and staying in the car park, or going to the cinema and reading the posters in the foyer instead of watching the film. Kids have enjoyed playing in sand, throwing stones at seagulls and paddling since time immemorial.

To say there is nothing for kids to do on the beach is an indication of how things have changed. What it means is that there are no televisions on the beach, no games consoles, no shops, nobody who needs impressing and where you have to make your own fun from what is there. This is clearly too much for a modern child.

I sound like a grumpy old man now, don’t I?

Yet another sunset picture above. I think this is a little too dark, but the colours are rather nice anyway. It’s not been shopped or chopped.

Cheers, Tom..

Just a short note today because we have guests and I don’t want to leave them for too long.

The sea is very rough at present and last night, we saw the rescue boat going out into it, so someone must have been missing. I really hope they are OK. I have the greatest respect for the bravery of the lifeboat crews.

The above picture is a less good one, but capturing the waves appears to be a tricky task that I need practice at.

Cheers, Tom.

Well, our visitors duly arrived just as the weather changed. How typical is that? We now have the wind howling off the sea and rain lashing down. There is a wild look to the place now that is quite appealing.

There was a complete lunar eclipse last night from 3AM to 5AM, with the rings of Saturn visible to the side of the moon. At least there would have been if it wasn’t completely obscured by clouds. There we were, perfectly situated to see it over the sea, but no chance.

So the picture above was taken at sunset on Tuesday evening.

Cheers, Tom.

Helen and I moved here at the start of December and today we get our first visitors. And some more next weekend, and probably more again after that. It’s great. Everyone loves the seaside and it’s to be hoped that all of our friends and relatives will want to come experience it for themselves. I expect most will wait for warmer weather before risking a swim though!

There is just something about the seaside that people like. I don’t know if it’s the sand, the wide-open vistas, the smell of the sea, the light or something else, but pretty much everyone seems to like it. Hopefully we’ll have a busy summer with lots of people wanting to come.

The people in the picture above were here on a day trip.

Cheers, Tom.

It’s often been said that a great way to meet people is to have a dog, and I’d always just accepted that without really thinking about it. We’ve had dogs for 6 or 7 years, but those years were all in the countryside where a walk with the dogs normally happened without seeing another soul, except maybe for a tractor driver in the distance. Now we are at the beach, a dog walk results in our dogs getting very excited to say hello to all the other dogs and as a result we end up talking to their owners.

Our youngest dog Dan isn’t quite 2 years old yet and he has puppyish enthusiasm for other dogs. He’ll be happily trotting beside you and you look away for a couple of seconds, look back, and he’s disappearing into the distance like a bullet. A whistle in the pocket is handy for this situation, although he is starting to come back when called now, thank heavens!

At some point soon I shall write about the thorny subject of dog poo on the beach, but we’ll keep that for the future!

The picture above shows Dan leaping into the air after his ball. I had to be very quick to throw the ball for him and then get the camera ready to take the picture. Oh to be ambidextrous!

Cheers, Tom.

It was a totally clear night last night and a lovely bright moon, so Helen and I went for a late-night walk on the beach, at about midnight. The dogs came as well, of course. It was really beautiful. The moon wasn’t quite full but was very bright and although it was too early for it to be over the sea, it was still lighting up the waves gloriously. The stars were shining and there was no sound except for the quiet splashing of the waves.

But just as the large print giveth and the small print taketh away, nature dealt the cruel blow of making it incredibly cold. There was no wind at all, but the chill was astonishing. I could actually feel my jeans freezing.

I tried to take some pictures, but none of them came out,  but I will try again when the moon is full on Thursday night. Typically of course, it’s expected to be cloudy then but you never know - I might be lucky! The picture above is of last nights sunset.

Cheers, Tom.

As you might expect, there are a great number of seashells to be found on the seashore. I realised yesterday that I know almost nothing about them. I remember as a child holding a shell to my ear and hearing the sea, and I suspect children have been doing this for thousands of years.

Shells have been inspirational over the years too. Many artists have used them in their paintings, and they are extensively used decoratively. They can be drilled and threaded onto necklaces, used as buttons, smashed and used as mosaic pieces, They can be made into beads, brooches, rings and combs and can even be used as tobacco pipes.

Surely every seaside town has at least one guesthouse or establishment called “The Seashell”?

But as is so often the case, there is a danger. Seashell collecting (properly known as conchology) from shells found on the beach is fine but all too often, divers collect the live molluscs and this can cause great ecological damage. The trade in mollusc shells is brisk and lucrative.

The picture above is of an arrangement of shells that Helen made for me on the beach just now.

Cheers, Tom.

It’s brighter at the seaside than inland. That is because of the light reflecting from the surface of the sea. But not only is it brighter, it’s also more changeable. As clouds pass over the sea, the reflection patterns change and the light changes with it, light to dark and back again. The changes can happen very quickly, in minutes or even in seconds.

The quality of the light is one of the things that has always attracted artists to the seaside, although the available subject matter is perhaps more important. The ever-changing light is endlessly fascinating for artists and fabulous for photographers who, with appropriate skill, are able to capture those fleeting instants of light. William Wordsworth described this perfectly in his poem “By The Seaside”. Here is a fragment:

“Stealthy withdrawings, interminglings mild
Of light with shade in beauty reconciled--
Such is the prospect far as sight can range,
The soothing recompense, the welcome change”

The photograph above shows the light and dark patterns I referred to above. A storm was coming from the sea onto the land, and the sun was still shining onto the waves while the sky behind is almost black. No more than a minute later, it had all changed to a uniform drab grey/black and I was soaked by the rain!

Cheers, Tom.

Its a fine day
People open windows
They leave their houses
Just want a short walk

Its going to be a fine night tonight
Its going to be a fine day tomorrow

They walk by the garden
They look at the sky
We will have salad

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYpXeSReUsY

(This is the original and best, acapella, version by Miss Jane)

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I don’t know if eight days of continuous warm weather and sunshine is unprecedented for February or not, but it has been a joy to experience it and the happiness it induces in the visitors to the beach. Yesterday morning, I saw a mum and dad picnicking on the beach while their three young children played merrily in the sand, running round, digging, throwing stones into the water, trying (and failing) to chase seagulls and having a very merry time of it.

Looking out of the window just now I saw a woman with two children, both carrying buckets and spades. I look forward to a long, warm summer of similar sights.

The picture above was taken last weekend.

Cheers, Tom.

I have often wondered whether there is something in the nature of dogs that makes them actually enjoy retrieving a ball or stick for hours on end, or if they merely do it because they think it pleases us humans. Whatever the case, their enthusiasm for this simple activity seems to know no bounds and it is a rare dog that doesn’t seem to enjoy it. Their pleasure appears to be amplified if they are retrieving from water and that makes the beach a wonderful location for playing “fetch the ball” with ones dog.

The picture above shows Dan running out of the freezing cold sea at full pelt with his ball in his mouth, and this was probably the 30th or 40th time he had done so in that session. I feel confident in saying that he looks happy with the situation. I did perhaps continue the session for too long, as he did eventually run away from me with his ball and wouldn’t come when I called, and we suspected it was because he was too cold. I shan’t make that mistake again: sea retrieving will have to wait until just before we return home in future.

Happy though he is in water, Dan is a little nervous of large waves. That was not the case for another dog I saw this morning, a cross between a spaniel and a collie. It’s owner was launching her ball a phenomenal distance into the sea and she swam right through huge waves to locate it by scent and then swam back again looking very pleased with herself. I hope I can train Dan to duplicate this feat, but perhaps I should wait until the sea is warmer - his coat is nowhere near as warm as that other dog’s.

Cheers, Tom.

Since today was the 4th warm and sunny day in a row, Helen and I made the bold decision to go for a swim in the sea. Yes, I know, perhaps foolhardy would be a better description. I reckoned it would be better when the tide was further out as then there would be just sand and no rocks underfoot, and it would be shallower so we could ease our way in gradually.

BIG mistake.

It was absolutely and utterly freezing. By the time I had waded out to my knees, the coldness was an actual physical pain, and by the time it reached my upper thighs I simply couldn’t take it any more and had to get out. But of course, since it was such a shallow slope, it took quite a while to walk out again. By the time I was actually out of the water and back onto the sand, my feet were completely numb - no feeling at all!

Helen thinks we should try it every week, weather permitting, but I’m not so sure. I’d rather leave it until May or even June, but I suspect she’ll manage to talk me round. It’s funny really because I tend to be more resistant to the cold than she is.

Above, is a picture to prove how sunny and Mediterranean looking it was!

Cheers, Tom.

When I went onto the beach this morning, the sun was just appearing through the hills at the back and rather curiously was only lighting up the tops of the waves in a narrow strip and nothing else. It was quite lovely. I tried to capture this with a photograph but despite taking over 200, none of them were really satisfactory. So the picture at the top today is last night’s sunset instead.

One thing about living on the West coast that you don’t get on the east coast (which is where I am from originally) is the stunning sunsets over the sea. The sun appears from behind the hills in the morning, shines through the houses onto the sea, travels over the village during the day and then dives into the sea where I keep expecting to see steam and hear a big hissing noise.

Cheers, Tom.

You can never be entirely sure what you’re going to see when the beach is your view. I saw a fat, fluffy white cat strolling along the promenade earlier, for example. Behind the cat was someone trotting a horse along the long, wide stretch of sand that is exposed when the tide is out. Yesterday afternoon it was bright and sunny and the waves shone beautifully white and almost Californian. The picture above was taken at this time.

I was reminded of the white waves when I  saw the film “Into The Wild” at the cinema recently. It’s a fantastic film and a true story that charts an American man’s rejection of traditional middle-class society for a long road-trip in the direction of wild Alaska, where he plans to live a natural life free of relationships and restrictions, just one man against (or at one with)  nature. It’s a beautiful film, and a profoundly moving one too. Who’d have thought that Sean Penn could write a screenplay and direct as well as act?

It gets Wild here too sometimes with the wind howling off the sea. Most of the houses are very well double-glazed and plastic-coated to try and minimize the damage that wind-blown saltwater causes. Garden plants need to be carefully selected for their salt resistance, which is why most people opt for just a plain lawn. It would be nice to have some salt-resistant plants growing at some point but for the moment the hedge and lawn will have to suffice..

Cheers, Tom.

I was up at the crack of dawn this morning (well, almost anyway!) to take some photos, because another fine day is in prospect. Typically, my lack of skill as a photographer let me down. The picture above doesn’t do justice to the subtle palette of colours that suffused the sky just before the sun appeared over the hills.

There is something nice about being up early and knowing that you have 12 hours of daylight ahead of you. I used to love staying up late, and I still do, but I now also like being up early sometimes.

Yesterday was the most glorious day imaginable, one of those that makes you feel glad to be alive. With bright sunshine, blue skies, and very little wind it felt almost like summer yet we aren’t even half way through February yet. I went for a long walk on the beach at low-tide with my dog Dan and took hundreds of photographs. It was proper t-shirt weather, but I wasn’t as bold as the brave souls I saw who went in the water. Three lads all went in, but they only went up to their waists and only stayed there for about 2 minutes. Still, well done them!

I will wait until at least Easter before I risk a swim myself. In the last week, I have seen both surfers and canoeists in the sea. I know they all wear wet-suits, but it beats me how they don’t freeze in the water. As an ex-motorcyclist I am used to dealing with the cold, but the wet coldness of seawater is another matter.

Cheers, Tom.

Last month, hump-back whales were seen in Cardigan bay. Not seen by me unfortunately, but I did see a school of dolphins. A small amount of research determined that they must have been bottle-nosed dolphins, and it’s estimated that 140 of these live in the bay.

Grey seals are frequent visitors to these waters too, although fewer in number than they used to be because of over-fishing. Two centuries ago, over 700 million Herring per year were caught in the bay. Nowadays only a tiny fraction of that is caught annually. Fishing still takes place  and the commonest catch is now the Dogfish, although lobsters, crabs, rays, flatfish, prawns and scallops are also caught.

Cardigan Bay is a strong candidate for becoming an EEC Special Area of Conservation (SAC) because of it’s reefs, sandbanks, caves, Dolphins, Seals and Lampreys. But in addition to those species covered by the SAC, this is also an important area for porpoise, wading birds and diving birds. In fact, Oystercatchers are on the beach in front of my house right now.

The commonest visitor here is of course the seagull and they are almost always both audible and visible. Wherever there is a patch of grass, the seagulls can be seen doing a curious dance, quickly moving their legs up and down. At first, I thought they were preparing to make a nest, but the explanation is quite remarkable. They are in fact simulating the sound of rain on the grass with their rhythmic foot-tapping and this brings worms to the surface for them to eat. I have tried several times to film them doing this, but they haven’t let me get close enough yet!

Cheers, Tom.

There is a particularly interesting feature on the beach very near here, and it is a petrified forest. At low tide, the stumps and roots of old trees can be seen, and a picture of one of these is shown above. They have been carbon dated and the remains are between 3500 and 5000 years old. It is amazing to walk on the beach and see these perfectly preserved specimens. The only reason they have survived is because they were in peat, whose acidic and anaerobic nature is ideal for their preservation.

What is now Cardigan bay was most likely land, with several settlements on it. At some point an event happened, possibly a tsunami or perhaps just advancing sea, that submerged the land. The petrified trees are evidence for this, and the coastline is thought to have been 12  miles further West of its current position.

A curious tale relates to this. The submerged land is known as Cantre’r Gwaelod, which roughly translates as “Lowland Hundred” in English. The land was said to have been protected by a series of dykes and sluice gates. The tale has it that the inebriate watchman Seithennin was at a party and forgot to close the sluice gates, and as a result the land was flooded. It is said that at very quiet times, the bells of the submerged church can still be heard…

A scientific survey is currently under way which aims to study the sea-bed ecology of the area, and it is hoped that this will provide firm evidence for the existence of Cantre’r Gwaelod. Whether this is achieved or not, the remains are a fascinating and unusual beach feature.

Cheers, Tom.

Sometimes, the wind howls off the sea with such ferocity that it is enough to knock you off your feet. Even the seagulls struggle, flapping their wings with all their might and not moving at all. Rather like Alice in Wonderland, it takes all of their flapping to stay in the same place. The wind is almost always in the same general direction, blowing from left to right and off the sea. This has the effect of making cycle trips very easy one way and very difficult the other.

Today, rather unusually, it is utterly windless. The waves continue to come in, just a little smaller in height than usual, with their roar undiminished. The wave noise is a constant factor living here, and it is never silent. Wherever you go you can hear both the sea and the seagulls, even through double glazed windows. I have always liked the idea of setting up a music recording studio, but if I did so here, the sound insulation would have to be of a very high standard.

I am learning to play Blues on an acoustic guitar, and one of these days I will write The Seaside Blues. When I have done so I will record it outside, and  the sounds of sea and gulls will be a feature of the recording. But first, a few more months practicing are called for.

The picture at the top is of a half-broken wave crashing over a break-water. It’s easy to see why it makes such a big noise.

Cheers, Tom.

Good morning to whomever may be reading this, my first ever blog entry. My name is Tom and I live right on the seafront in a small village near the beautiful university town of Aberystwyth, on the glorious West coast of Wales. I live with my partner Helen, our dogs Shep and Dan, our cat Molly and our rabbit Johnny.

My intention is to write an entry here every day. The subjects will sometimes be related to the seaside, but not always. Environmental issues will come up frequently as will music, cinema and The Arts. I hope to include a photograph every day too.

For this first blog, I will explain briefly why I like living here.

The air here smells clean and fresh. Most of the time, the wind comes from the sea onto the land and it feels untainted by humanity even though I know that isn’t really true. I love being able to open my curtains every morning and see what the sea is doing. It is different every day and the waves and their patterns are ever-changing:

Big waves, small waves
white waves, grey waves
Ones that ripple, ones that splash
Ones that spray and ones that crash.

The weather changes here so quickly it’s sometimes almost beyond belief. Yesterday morning, it was bright and 5 minutes later a hailstorm crashed against my windows. 5 minutes after that the sky was blue again. I love that unpredictability, and it’s wise at this time of year to always be carrying both a waterproof hat and sunglasses.

Oystercatchers sit on the beach in front of my house and last week, a school of dolphins was playing in the bay. Nature feels very close on the seafront.

There is one aspect of seaside living that might not occur to those unfamiliar with it. Everyone who comes here does so in order to enjoy themselves. People come for the day out and bring their children and as a result they are happy. If I smile at someone, they smile back. This pleasant feeling puts a warm glow over the whole village

I have attached a photograph of sunset over the beach. It was taken on new years day this year. The colours have not been fiddled with - this is exactly how it looked! The quality of the picture has had to be reduced for this page, unfortunately.

Cheers, Tom.