April 16th, 2010
Living by the sea it’s hard not to have a love-hate relationship with our commonest (and noisiest) neighbours, the herring gulls. Hate when you’ve just hung a white sheet out on the line and they crap all over it, or somehow hover en masse above your car to cover it generously from top to bottom in their paint-stripping excrement. Hate when their dawn chorus wakes you up at 5am with a massed screeching that could rouse the dead. Hate the idiots who persist in feeding them, even though they’re easily the most successful scavengers around and there are far too many of them already.
But at the same time they’ve got as much character as Cockney cab drivers and they’re fascinating to watch. Fix one with a stare and it responds with a shifty look, as if it just happened to be passing and wasn’t up to anything, honest Guv. Living in such close proximity to them offers a rare chance to observe them up close right through the year, to learn a bit of their language and to enjoy some of their odder quirks – like staring thoughtfully at their own feet for minutes at a time. They make excellent weather-vanes too if you’re not sure of the wind direction.
It’s mating season right now, and the air is filled with the distracting, and rather revolting sound of seagulls shagging, the male balancing on top of the female (often on a chimney top) and flapping his wings while uttering an all too distinctive series of squawks that can be heard for streets around – talk about exhibitionism. In a few weeks, of course, we’ll have the chicks (two to three to a nest, many of which die in the first few weeks, usually by falling off roofs), and their incessant, night and day squeaking is going to be driving us mad till they finally learn to fly in mid summer. And that’s another story entirely.
February 26th, 2010
First sunny day for a week, but a high wind too, and drama on the beach: huge waves dumping thousands of tonnes of water on the shore, high tide, long swell, bad undertow, and there between the waves two swimmers thrashing about – at first I thought they must be surfers but if they did have boards they’d both lost them in the breakers.
Watching them being swept further and further out, with little chance of being able to swim their way through the hundred feet of dragging white water between them and the beach, it began to look as if we were going to have to watch them drown; people were already running along the beach and watching from the streets above; reaching into my pocket I realised I hadn’t even got my mobile, but then a police car raced up to the top of the breakwater and policemen in high-visibility vests were running down to the huddle of people on the beach.
Long minutes while nothing seemed to happen, and only one swimmer’s head could still be seen, going under then coming up again and sometimes waving an arm; and then finally here came the cavalry, as the coastguard helicopter reared up from behind the beach, swung round overhead while everyone below gestured out into the waves where the swimmer was, then in a matter of a minute it was hovering overhead, winching down the paramedic, who seemed to take only a few seconds to pluck the bedraggled swimmer out of the churning sea.
And off they went, leaving the beach clustered with onlookers and, amazingly, the second swimmer, who had somehow battled his way back through the surf and the exploding waves, to huddle together with his chastened, helpless friends.
January 11th, 2010
Driving across the causeway to the island this morning I nearly swerved off the road when a kingfisher suddenly shot past and flew alongside me, its short sharp beak and the rapid flapping of its wings instantly distinctive, more so even than its brilliant colouring in the dark, misty drizzle that’s descended on us today. It seems odd to see kingfishers right by the sea, but we’ve seen them flying along the edge of Portland harbour now for three winters in a row.
November 18th, 2009
Living three miles out to sea has its advantages (more sunshine than average, later sunsets, cleaner air…) but when we get a south-westerly gale like the one that’s been raging for the last couple of days we really get it in the neck. Everything booms and rattles all day and all night, the salt spray burns our precious plants, and my study windows get so thickly coated with oily spray that I can hardly see outside. Even a walk to the end of the street leaves you breathless, completely dishevelled and slightly sticky with salt.
On days like these I’m thankful for our foot-thick Portland-stone walls, which must have witnessed many gales far worse than this, such as the Great Gale of November 1824 (more colourfully known as The Outrage) which breached Chesil Beach, drowned 25 islanders, swept away the old ferry across the Fleet and even, a mile or two inland, blew a farmer’s turnips clean out of the ground.
