Look Out!

Further to my stumbling attempts at showing you Brightlingsea on Tuesday, here's another photograph from the same location on my day out in estuarial Essex. The reason why I've been spending time here will become clear, but I just wondered if anybody knew anything about this tower? Just a name would be good. Most of it looks Victorian, but the top is obviously comparatively new. The Ordnance map just says 'tower', unhelpfully. I expect it's used as an observation post for local yacht racing now, the commodore sitting up there with a big pair of binoculars. I was going to say with a packet of twenty Senior Service open on a navigation chart of the Colne estuary, but that's probably unlikely. My first encounter with those fantastic russet-sailed Thames barges was here in Brightlingsea in the late 70s, much later I actually helped 'crew' one, ie: went and hid in the cargo hold when the wind got up. Avast there, land ahoy,your turn in the barrel!

Holiday Supplement

A day at Walberswick on the Suffolk coast. Reached down winding lanes across the sandy heaths or by a rowing boat ferry from the Southwold shore, this is rapidly becoming a Daily Telegraph reading version of The Hamptons, that playground of the wealthy middle class in north east America. So reminiscent of Edward Hopper paintings with stark bright light, hard shadows and black weatherboarded orange pantiled buildings next to the River Blyth outfall. Everything crying out to be recorded in paint or pixels. Out on The Flats, children (including mine) let string down from a wooden bridge parapet over a tidal creek to catch little crabs with bacon bait. We used washing tablet net bags weighted with pebbles. Caught many, landed few. If I was a crab I'd lay up in a bed of samphire until the evening. Girls walk by on the beach discussing gap years on tiny mobiles, fathers start to relax in big navy blue shorts and mothers fret about the unsuitable boys their sons have brought down for the summer. Bright pinpoints of light sparkle on the water, shouts of pleasure are carried off like seagull cries on the breeze. I sit in the marram grass of the dunes keeping an eye on Youngest Boy as he crests the smaller waves and shouts something unspeakable to his brother. My boot catches something buried deep in the warm sand- a torn piece of rusted metal like a shapeless sea monster that goes straight into my bag. I like it here.

Tidal Reaches 2

Once it gets into October you can almost hear the North Norfolk coast heaving a well-earned sigh of relief as most of the population retreats back to Chiswick. Here on Brancaster Staithe they just quietly get on with gutting fish, doing something to bags of mussels and putting village notices up in an old Eastern Counties bus timetable frame. And of course abandoning their boats so that they can lean with the weather like the Norfolk trademark pines on the horizon. I did wonder if this vessel ever uprighted itself on the higher reaches of the tide, listening as I did to the first gurglings in the reed-bound mud as the sea once again started to push against the hull of an active fishing boat, (short-wheel based Landrover in attendance). I had to buy a big fresh crab in a brown paper bag for my fish-obsessed ten-year-old from a little wooden hut.