What with it being a Bank Holiday weekend and with the Daughters off on a Guides camp, Darling Wife and I decided to take the Bentley for a spin over to southwest Lancashire to visit my mother, who resides within salt spray reach of the golden sands.
I do like the big skies that come with the flat lands and even flatter beaches in that part of the world. Over twenty miles of golden sands stretch between Liverpool and Southport and these days, I promise you, most of it is pretty damn clean. Very different from my childhood when open sewers vomited filth into the Irish Sea. And providing a shoreline backdrop is Britain's longest chain of sand dunes, over 100ft high in places and carpeted in swaying marram.
These are big open spaces with seas that retreat over a mile at low tide, yielding all sorts of flotsam and jetsam cast up on the yellow sand, free gifts from Neptune. Coal washed up from undersea seams off the Point of Ayr in North Wales and which burns with a green/blue flame due to the salt; logs and even whole trees washed down from Pennine and Lakeland forests; great wrecks of razor and cockle shells following a storm; Knick-knacks of all shapes and sizes washed overboard; and always, I promise you always, at least one grapefruit!
Coconuts? Never. Grapefruits? Regular as clockwork. But I've absolutely no idea where they come from - one of life's great mysteries!
LC James
Besides the Sea
3rd May 2010
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