A bit of warm weather and some reasonably strong winds in the right direction and the VW Camper vans start rolling up to the front and the long-haired, wet-suited lads climb out to do their thing. Why do they all drive VW Campers though? And how come they are all so thin? What do they do for the rest of the week? So many questions.

The sailing enthusiasts will be next. The fishermen have never been away and even at the coldest times there still a few hardy surfers. A few either bold or blasé swimmers have been around during even the worst weather, but I don’t expect to see them in large numbers until at least June. I will of course be a regular swimmer once it’s warm enough.

(the picture gets bigger if you click on it)

Cheers, Tom.

Something I have alluded to on my blogs more than once is that here at the seaside, we see more than a usual number of people in a good mood. People smile at you, say hello and generally appear to be enjoying themselves more than you tend to see in inland towns and cities. This is for the simple reason that they have deliberately come here for a day out or for a week on holiday and so they are determined to have a good time. And, of course, it’s beautiful.

I took the above picture just before sunset a couple of weeks ago. There was a group of lads playing football at low tide and clearly having a great time of it and when they packed up to go, one of them left this cheery message behind. It would have been completely dark about 30 minutes later and within a couple of hours the tide would have permanently erased it. In all probability, the message would never be seen by  anyone, but still he left the message anyway. Luckily I was there to capture it for posterity, and now you can see it too.

(the picture gets bigger if you click on it)

Cheers, Tom.

I mentioned the other day how much stuff gets washed up onto the beach. Something that you can’t take a step without standing on are shells. All sorts of shells of all shapes and sizes. A while ago, Helen collected some and arranged them in a pattern and I took pictures of them. I posted one of these a while ago, and the two pictures you see here are from the same session (and they get bigger if you click on them). At some point we’ll repeat the exercise with a larger pattern.

Of the shells you can see in the pictures, they are mostly scallops and cockles, with a few augers and tulips too.

Cheers, Tom.

Every day when I walk the dogs, their excitement to get there is tremendous. Yapping before they go, pulling at their leads, racing up the steps onto the seawall and down onto the beach dragging me with them. Then when I finally let them off, a mad frenzy of running round sniffing things while I take photographs. It’s normally topped off with a ball-throwing session with Dan, while Shep tries to herd him. This film demonstrates their natures nicely:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md6UkAYHWMM

By total fluke, there is a ship just above Dan’s nose in the picture above of him leaping for his  ball. Unfortunately, the ball is just out of shot and the horizon line isn’t flat. Without those flaws it would have been a good picture, but I like it anyway (and it gets bigger if you click on it).

Cheers, Tom.

The type and range of objects found on the beach is simply astonishing:

Things that have fallen from boats: anchors, ropes, tyres, etc.

Dead things: birds, fish, molluscs, shells, crabs, sharks, even a sheep once

Fishing equipment: nets, lines, hooks, sinkers, floats, buoys, etc.

Driftwood, large and small, logs, branches, twigs, plants

Stuff people have left: blankets, broken umbrellas, aerosols, lotion bottles, shoes, balls, frisbees

Litter: crisp wrappers, chip papers, tins, bottles, etc.

Thankfully, it is reasonably common now to see council workmen tidying the place up and bagging the litter. It would of course be preferable if the litter wasn’t dropped in the first place! There are bins about every 50 yards and they are emptied pretty much daily so there’s no excuse for this except lack of care and laziness.

We have accumulated a sizable collection of interesting items from the beach now. With waves the size of the one in the picture above it’s not surprising that even quite large and heavy objects get flung up onto the beach, during extreme weather conditions. Here are a few of the larger things we've found:

Cheers, Tom.

(the picture gets bigger if you click on it)

I have taken 16,000 pictures since we moved here in December, which is about 150 per day. Each one is over 2Mb in size. I’ve had an ongoing policy of trying to sort them into folders of like-minded pictures and keep the wheat and discard the chaff as I was doing so, but all the same I had ended up with the disk on my laptop 95% full.

So yesterday, I went through the pictures and got rid of the less good ones, and implemented a storage scheme. Now my disk is only 85% full. Hooray! It will last another 3 weeks now.

If there is one thing I learned from my years in the computer industry, it’s to backup your data. So I did that yesterday too, using an external USB hard disk. If you have data you value, whether it be pictures, documents, music or whatever, do yourself a big favour and get it backed up. CDs or DVDs will do, but I’d recommend an external disk. They are very cheap, and you just plug them in, and copy your data onto them. Cheap as chips and as reliable as a very reliable thing.

Anyway, whilst going through the pictures, I found the above one that I took in January. The sky really was that colour, and I haven’t fiddled with it in any way.

Cheers, Tom.

The sea looks different every day. I assure you that this is true. Every morning when I get up I look at the sea and there are no two days where it looks the same. All it takes is the wind to be blowing slightly more or less strongly or from a slightly different direction and it’s not the same. A slight haze, or a small cloud moving in front of the sun and it’s different again. And then there’s the height of the tide to factor in as well.

I took the above picture last night just before sunset and because there was very little wind the sea was completely smooth, which is why the horizon line is so sharp.

Cheers, Tom.

It’s a grey old day this morning. Yesterday, the clouds were very patchy and the very high wind had blown the wet sand into a smooth, almost mirror-like surface as you can see in the above picture.

One thing I remember very clearly from my childhood visits to the seaside was the sun reflecting off the sea and the wet sand. I mentioned this in a previous blog, but it really is lighter at the seaside. The sun reflecting off the sea provides more light, and of a more changeable variety as well, which is why it was a favourite location for impressionist artists such as these:

http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ladylever/exhibitions/besidetheseaside/

It’s far easier for a photographer than an artist to capture those moments in time when the light is a certain way and then in another moment it has gone forever.

Cheers, Tom.

There are lambs everywhere at the moment. Even here, overlooking the sea.

Cheers, Tom.

I was expecting it to be busy here this weekend, but it hasn’t been so far. There were a few more people on the beach than usual and a few more cars parked on the sea road, but not that many more, really. The chip shop and amusement arcades were open though, so clearly they were hoping for trade.

The expected bad weather has thankfully only been brief, thankfully. There has been high wind, but only a little rain yesterday. Oh, and one teensy-weensy hailstorm too. The picture above shows the strange light we had yesterday before the hailstorm.

Cheers, Tom.

Apparently rain is forecast for later, but for the moment the sun is reflecting rather beautifully off the sea with dark clouds above, rather like in the above picture.

My cousing Shaun is visiting at the moment, and we'll have a walk on the beach with the dogs in a short while.

Cheers, Tom.

Living this close to the sea gives a few problems that you wouldn’t immediately think of:

Our garden gate fell off it’s hinges yesterday - a combination of rust and rotten wood

My bicycle is rusted to pieces and it’s only taken 3 months

Cars need washing far more regularly than in other places

The windows get covered in salt so that you can’t see out of them

Gardens need to be planted with salt-tolerant plants

And those are just the ones off the top of my head. Add to this the fact that sand gets absolutely everywhere and a bit more of the picture is filled in. But the advantages still far outweigh the disadvantages. Such as the views, for example. In the picture above, as you can see, even the seagulls are admiring the view.

Cheers, Tom.

Well, officially it’s not spring until midnight tomorrow, but it’s as good as. The council are out picking litter up from the beach - spring-cleaning is happening ready for a big influx of visitors over Easter. And it’s a gorgeous spring day again.

They have even painted the steps up to the sea wall a nice vivid shade of red.

Cheers, Tom.

The picture above was taken from our balcony at about 6PM last night. The colours haven’t been fiddled with at all: that’s actually what it looked like. Those long summer evenings are just going to fly by, and I can’t wait!

Cheers, Tom.

“Sun is shining, weather is sweet
Makes you want to move those dancing feet”

The sea is as smooth as a babies bottom and as blue as the Mediterranean in summer, and there isn’t even a single cloud in the sky.

I’ve just returned from a walk on the beach with the dogs at low tide, and it’s a great feeling. The long expanse of golden sand leading down to the blue sea almost glows in the sunlight. Spring is just round the corner!

The above picture is hot off the presses.

Cheers, Tom.

Helen and I have been wondering when the tourists will start arriving en-masse. Some people have mooted Easter. The caravanning season officially started on March 1st, and dogs are banned from the main beach from 1st May. So some time between Easter and May, probably. Apparently the school holidays aren’t in synch with Easter this year because it’s a particularly early one.

The above picture was taken today (Sunday) at about Mid-day. There was one person with a dog in the distance behind me but apart from that there was just me and the dogs.

Cheers, Tom.

I have been playing guitar since I was 15 now, which is almost 30 years. That’s quite a scary thought for me. There have been gaps, sometimes of many years, where I haven’t even touched a guitar at all, but I have always owned one.

A few years ago was at the end of one of the longest of those gaps, and the thing that brought it to an end was hearing a song by Johnny Cash. The song was called “Delia’s Gone” and is from his 1994 album “American Recordings”. Here is Johnny singing it:

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

There is nothing on the song but his voice and an acoustic guitar, but it completely caught my attention and I thought to myself “I’d like to be able to do that”. So I bought a reasonable quality acoustic guitar and started learning to play in his style. I’ve come a fair way since then, and I can now play and sing several of his songs reasonably well. Here is my rendition of the 2nd song from the same album as “Delia’s Gone”. It’s called “Let The Train Blow The Whistle”. I intend to post more videos of myself singing and playing on youtube as time goes on. And of course, Delia’s Gone will be one of them, but not yet!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyN656K-Ths

Cheers, Tom.

I bet you hadn’t thought of that, had you? The above picture is of Helen, through our balcony door. The wind blows salt-water and spume onto the windows and when it dries, it ends up like this. All the front windows are the same, and even the back ones are affected.  A heavy rainstorm cleans them nicely though.

Cheers, Tom.

I watched the film Zeitgeistmovie last night, and I have to say I wasn’t very impressed with it.

http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/main.htm

It’s in 3 broad sections:

1. Religion is a big lie
2. 911 and the war on terror was the work of GW Bush and others
3. Bankers have the real power and only care about profit and the effects of this are far-reaching.

It’s reasonably well made and does make a few good points, but is a very USA-centric film.

The 1st third is preaching to the converted for the non-religious, but will be condemned out of hand by the religious. I would guess the primary audience would be agnostics.

The 2nd third seems far-fetched and suffers from Michael Moore documentary syndrome: small details are blown out of proportion, links are made which are hard to justify, the other side isn’t shown, and opinions are presented as facts. Personally, I simply can‘t accept that The Twin Towers and the Pentagon were blown up by a plan by Bush and his compadres. If this were true, someone of the hundreds or thousands involved would have come forward and said so. I know big lies are more easily swallowed, but this is just too much. The “evidence” given for it is very flimsy and easily has holes punched in it. The most obvious one is that for a “controlled destruction”, miles and miles of cable have to be laid over many months and this simply couldn’t have been done throughout buildings of that size without someone noticing and making a fuss about it.

The 3rd third covers a lot of ground and is perhaps the most interesting. But, the suggestion that people are being deliberately dumbed-down by a planned campaign of bad television, drugs, alcohol and poor education seems too far-fetched. There are so many flaws with this theory that it’s hard to give much credence to it. Alcohol has been around for far longer than The Illuminati have and if they want everyone drunk, why is it taxed?  And if taxation is illegal in America and the education is deliberately poor, then why does taxation pay for education at all?

The 3 points basically add up to one big one: Those with the real power aren’t who you think they are and they’ll do absolutely anything, however heinous, in order to keep their power and maintain their profits. This even includes World Wars. The ultimate aim is apparently a “One World Government” run by an “Intellectual elite and world bankers”. Oh, and they’re going to microchip everyone too.

Ultimately, this comes across as a film made by a bunch of nutters who believe every conspiracy theory there is. I’m almost surprised that they didn’t try and prove that the moon landings never happened. This is a shame, because the few good points that they do make will be largely ignored by people laughing at the more mad theories they have.

“It’s all a big fat lie”

It certainly is. I’m hugely sceptical myself and despise the results of the capitalist system, but there is simply too much here that is unbelievable. This film is thus ultimately a noble failure.

The picture above is of me controlling Dan with treats: ball and food in this case. Dogs are easier to oppress than people are.

Helen and I saw the weirdest thing last night, and again this morning. When we looked out of the window, we could see what looked like snow blowing straight off the sea. Quite a lot of it. So being the intrepid explorer I am I suggested going to have a look. It was spume, whipped off the surface of the sea by the very strong winds and over the sea wall. The reason there was so  much of it was because of the gap in the shingle made by yesterday’s high tides (see yesterday’s blog).

Rather than blowing into the shingle and dissipating, the spume was blowing through the gap and accumulating below the sea wall, where it appeared to throb and pulsate rather like a very scary alien from Doctor Who. It appeared to be quite deep, perhaps 30cm at the deepest points. When the wind gusted, it sent the higher points of the spume mountain over the sea wall. It really was the most peculiar site. The picture above shows one of the spume banks, and the youtube clips below show much more.

In case anyone is interested, spume is created by the wind tearing at wave crests. It needs a speed of at least 11 metres per second to reliably form. You wouldn’t believe how hard it was to find that out on the internet!

Turn your speakers down before watching these - the wind noise is terrific:

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHe9DiRd2HE

Cheers, Tom

Some parts of the country suffered badly from the storm, but it wasn’t so bad here. As my friend Nathalie once said when she lived on a barge “The best place to be when there’s a lot of water about is in a boat”. Similarly, the best place to be in the huge storms and winds of the last few days was behind the rather high sea wall. But complacency wouldn‘t be right. Sea walls were breached at a couple of places in Devon and Cornwall, and one supposedly protected camp-site had to be evacuated.

Helen and I were discussing yesterday if it might have been a mistake to buy a seaside property. Global Warming and rising sea-levels might be just around the corner and we might be left with a white elephant of a house prone to flooding that we can neither sell nor insure. But thankfully that doesn’t seem likely for quite a few years yet.

Some of the shingle has been washed away and there is now a more shallow slope but that’s the only visible effect, apart from the surprising benefit that a lot of rubbish has also been washed away. Into the sea though, unfortunately. The picture above shows where the shingle that has been washed away. That’s supposed to be flat, not sloping. At high tide yesterday there was a river of seawater flowing down there. Normally the sea doesn’t come up the shingle at all.

I made some videos and put them onto you tube - see links below. There are more available if you click on my username (the rather embarrassing “seksdeth”). I’ll upload a few more during today so if you find these interesting it might be worth checking for more later. The sound rumbles a bit because of the wind and waves, so turn your speakers down a little first!

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnIKclVPD1Y

I was wearing wellies when I took those films!

Cheers, Tom.

There was some wind overnight, but nothing particularly excessive. Also some rain but again nothing out of the ordinary. But there is an amazingly high tide outside at the moment. The actual peak was at 9:40 and like the intrepid reporter I am, I was out getting drenched in rain and spray to take some pictures. The waves were washing clear over the shingle bank to make a pool behind it, and even splashed up onto the sea wall. I spoke to an old man who has lived here for a very long time and he says he’s only seen waves up the sea wall once before and that was before they built the shingle bank.

The waves have actually washed away part of the shingle bank as can be seen in this picture:

Cheers, Tom.

Yesterday in my blog I was talking about the omnipresence of The Net. Being able to use it properly requires a nice fast connection and for most of us that means Broadband. A Broadband connection enables so much. You can watch all the music videos your heart desires, you can download music and films, get music lessons, do an Open University course and a hundred million other things. I’ve spent many hours just randomly clicking round youtube looking at all the mad, funny, musical and weird things people get up to.

The future holds many more possibilities. We could ultimately end up voting online rather than going to polling stations, for example. This would increase turnout as both the housebound and the lazy would have no excuse to not do it. But would this let Big Brother into our homes? Would there be a secret database that kept track of our voting habits for some nefarious or commercial purpose?

Imagine if we could all vote on everything they talk about in the House of Commons. Would we still have started the war in Iraq? Would there be a congestion charge in London? Would we continue Trident or build more nuclear power stations? I don’t know, and I don’t even know if it would be a good idea.  But one thing is certain: if this were done, there would be a whole group of people, whether underclass, outsiders or just objectors, who wouldn’t take part.

I find it quite easy to imagine that at some point in the near future, all homes will be given broadband and it will be free (or rather paid for from central taxation). This could have many affects. It would probably destroy daily newspapers, television and radio stations, cds and dvds would stop being bought, and information and disinformation would become massively powerful tools. This isn’t the ravings of a seaside nutter either, the signs for all of these are already being seen.

We live in a very interesting time of great change.

The picture above is of a very fat pipe that used to carry sewage into the sea, but now doesn’t. We don’t pump sewage into the sea any more, thankfully, and the beach here has awards for cleanliness.

Cheers, Tom.

I used to read lots of sci-fi books when I was younger. The internet as it is now wasn’t exactly described in any of the books, but some got quite close. The World Wide Web is now available everywhere on the planet (if you have a satellite phone and a laptop anyway), and pretty much any piece of music, television programme, film and work of art is available for consumption. Books will soon be available too.

It’s getting to the point already that it doesn’t exist unless it’s on the internet. “Do you have a link to prove that?” I saw someone type on a message board once. Argument won’t do any more: you need a link.

So where is this all going in the next 10-20 years? I have no idea, but I think we are a long way away from The Matrix future yet. I do know it will change films and music though. With more people illegally downloading and streaming films and music, the market for conventional buying of such things will diminish, resulting in greater emphasis on live music and on events that you either have to physically attend, or pay to see and hear streamed live.

That all sounds good to me.

My wireless broadband works nicely from the balcony, so I’ll try using it there in the summer. In the picture above, my glamorous assistant Helen was required to prevent the wind from blowing the laptop away! You can just make out the sea in the background.

Cheers, Tom.

I want one of these:

http://www.petewoodmanguitars.com/page23.htm

And this is what I want to do on it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrMmIAm2tTg&feature=related
The question is, is it worth me spending over £800 pounds on it. Ah, decisions decisions.

I’ve managed to avoid working for over a year now, but my savings are dropping all the time and eventually I will have to stop being a beach bum and do some work again, and buying this guitar will accelerate that. But I really want it!

What would you do?

Cheers, Tom.

I live in Wales, the symbolic home of the leek. It’s our national vegetable. So why is it that at our local supermarket, leeks cost £2.00 for 3? Eh, tell me! Vegetables are supposed to be cheap! Small Red Peppers are about 80p each, and don’t get me started on Broccoli!

Part of the problem is that there are now few other places to buy vegetables. I know of one traditional greengrocer’s shop in Aberystwyth, but they are now becoming a rarity. There is the odd farmer’s market and the occasional expensive whole food shop, but apart from that supermarkets have the market cornered. People go there, do a weekly shop to buy everything and that’s it.

Helen and I realised recently that most people simply don’t buy many vegetables and so don’t notice how expensive they are. They’ll buy potatoes to have with their meaty meal, a few carrots, some tins of peas and so on, but any other vegetables they buy will be small amounts to have with something else. For vegetarians like us, the vegetables ARE the meal and we eat a lot of them. Buying cauliflower, carrots, onions, leeks, broccoli, squash, peppers, sweet potatoes, swedes, sprouts and so on comes to quite a bit of money, especially if you buy organic

There are of course a few other factors in the price besides supermarket profits. There is the cost of transporting the vegetables from where they are grown to a central distribution warehouse, the packaging cost there, and then the further transportation cost to get them to the stores. A further price hike occurs if the vegetables are out of season, which means they have been refrigerated for a few months (with the environmental cost that this causes as well), and again if the vegetables have been brought from overseas. I saw some Kenyan carrots in the supermarket recently and didn’t buy them on principle. Why on earth are we shipping carrots from Kenya to Wales?

But there are more things you can do with fruit than just eat it. And get your minds out of the gutter please, I’m talking about art:

“Born in 1526 in Milan into a family of artists, Giuseppe Arcimboldo served as court painter to Habsburg emperors Maximilian II and Rudolf II, and is best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of such objects as fruits, vegetables, flowers, birds etc.”

http://www.abcgallery.com/A/arcimboldo/arcimboldo13.JPG

http://www.abcgallery.com/A/arcimboldo/arcimboldo.html

If you can, please try to buy locally grown vegetables from a place other than a supermarket. They will probably be fresher and taste better, will most likely be cheaper, and since they have been transported a shorter distance be more environmentally friendly.

You will note that the photographed vegetable face above that is angry about the price of vegetables doesn’t contain any leeks. That’s because I was too tight to buy any!

Cheers, Tom.