“If there is one thing more hateful than another, it is being told what to admire and having objects pointed out to one with a stick.†– Francis Kilvert
Hooting Yard
“If there is one thing more hateful than another, it is being told what to admire and having objects pointed out to one with a stick.†– Francis Kilvert
Dear Mr. Key
How true, sticks can be vile things in the hands of aggressive pedants. I must admit I was overcome by your reference to my comment about Jaywick (swoon – grasp furniture – pant, mop brow), and, thus, have only just summoned up a sufficiency of courage with which to assay a reply. So, I want to tell you now why the coast of Essex is so downright disturbing, to me at least.
Let me take you back many years to another coast entirely, for before ending my wanderings on the margins of the dun coloured North Sea I resided as a child upon the bluff, honest, and vertical coast of North Cornwall. Here was a coast where you knew where you stood. Indeed, if you stood in the wrong place you would fall to your certain death on the rocks below. As an infant I would rush from my simple village shack and down a well trodden path to revell in the emphatic division between the boiling Atlantic swell and the stout cliffs of adamantine Cornish slate. Locked, as they are, in an eternal struggle from which one day, millions of years hence, the sea will ultimately emerge triumphant closing over the last eroded stump of rock.
Now you can see, I hope, how unsettling the marshy shore of Essex is to a person such as I, brought up to the crack of waves on hard rock and the Fulmars ever gliding on the currents of air above the scene of geomorphological battle. To me is something almost obscene about the tortuous mingling of sea and shore, something devious and disturbing. Add to that thoroughly grim places likely Jaywick, and bingo, one is hard pressed to trust the permanence of any bit of land on which one might set one’s foot.
Anyway, ciao & thank you for your superb musings, which I struggle to find time to read….
wst : Many thanks for this enlightening piece on sea and shore. It need not be a struggle to keep up with Hooting Yard if you use your common sense and jettison those parts of your daily routine which interfere with the all-important activity of Yard-reading. Toss out such fripperies as work and sleep and use your time wisely.