Burnham-on-Sea

 

We went to Burnham-on-Sea (9 April 2023), for the first time in quite a few years. (As usual we left the van in Highbridge and walked to Burnham along the Brue Estuary.) Fresh from leafing through the photographer Gus Wylie's Hebridean Light (rescued from the paper-recycling skip at the dump), I tried to take some atmospheric photos of the light of the Bristol Channel.

“She’d never noticed if it hadn’t been for Sid. Confound it! sometimes she sews it with white, and sometimes she sews it with black. I wish to gee-miny she’d stick to one or t’other—I can’t keep the run of ’em. But I bet you I’ll lam Sid for that. I’ll learn him!”

He was not the Model Boy of the village. He knew the model boy very well though—and loathed him.

Within two minutes, or even less, he had forgotten all his troubles. Not because his troubles were one whit less heavy and bitter to him than a man’s are to a man, but because a new and powerful interest bore them down and drove them out of his mind for the time—just as men’s misfortunes are forgotten in the excitement of new enterprises. This new interest was a valued novelty in whistling, which he had just acquired from a negro, and he was suffering to practise it un-disturbed. It consisted in a peculiar bird-like turn, a sort of liquid warble, produced by touching the tongue to the roof of the mouth at short intervals in the midst of the music—the reader probably remembers how to do it, if he has ever been a boy. Diligence and attention soon gave him the knack of it, and he strode down the street with his mouth full of harmony and his soul full of gratitude. He felt much as an astronomer feels who has discovered a new planet—no doubt, as far as strong, deep, unalloyed pleasure is concerned, the advantage was with the boy, not the astronomer.

I spent 50p on Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and another 50p on Beethoven's 3rd Piano Concerto (in C minor, with the second movement in the transcendent non-sequitur of E ... though to be fair he does this kind of thing in the first and fifth piano concertos too), and the Fidelio Overture. Oh, and another 50p on an old road map of the Western Isles to help me navigate around Hebridean Light. That's my favourite kind of shopping. 

Seedlings on the seaward edge of the dunes.

White variety of Red Deadnettle (Lamium purpureum).

Blackthorn (Prunus spinosa) on the walk back to Highbridge along the Brue Estuary. We stopped to have an unnecessary thermos, and watched a Great Egret poking about in the pools. It was unnecessary because we knew we were going  straight to the new Starbucks at Dunball services. Here we watched a pair of eager crows sitting in the gantry above the fuel pumps. Possibly not an ideal perch from the air quality perspective, but perfect for spotting any dropped subs or pastries.