Thursday, March 19, 2009

Beach, Wave, Venus and Stone










I'm getting a bit behind in posting, so here are some pictures of the coast taken through the winter.

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

the snow it melts the soonest







When the winds begin to sing. Or in our case when they don't quite make it as far as our town in the first place. While the rest of the country became covered with the deepest layer of snow for about a decade the coastal towns remained immune to the touch of it. On top of the hill facing north east on the only patch of local snow available, I could look towards the north and see all the distant hills covered with the stuff. When I went to work in town on the bus the snowy landscape started just the other side of the hill at Newton Pop and could be seen from the window all the way into town. Some friends were snowed in for about four days, a long time in this country. Okehampton had about twelve inches, an unheard of amount.

One of the good things about our country is that we are always unprepared for anything as unusual as snow and the whole place quickly falls apart, travelling is impossible and anyone with any sense gives up and makes an impromptu holiday of the occasion and enjoys a rare chance to play in the snow. Our local children had to make do with snow scraped from cars that had come in from the surrounding countryside to use for snowballs, which would have been a sad sight if it wasn't for them enjoying it so much.

Snows They Melt The Soonest is a lovely old traditional song that I know from the work of Dick Gaughan and puts pay to the lie that working class people weren't capable of a proper emotional life of the sort that the moneyed classes enjoyed. Dick Gaughan has a beautiful voice and his interpretations are well worth a listen, I especially like his version of Erin go Bragh from the album "Handful Of Earth". He is also a writer and has an interesting history of the UK in the 80s which is not quite the official version that we usually get.

http://www.dickgaughan.co.uk/index.html