Island Life
I moved to the Isle of Portland in 2003, into an old stone house on a steep street just fifty feet above Chesil Beach. From my writing desk I look out across the vast sweep of Lyme Bay towards Lyme Regis and Devon – sometimes, on really clear evenings, I can see the tors of Dartmoor as the sun sets behind them, fifty or sixty miles away.
Connected to the mainland only by the causeway that runs along the back of Chesil Beach, Portland is an unearthly place, unlike anywhere else in Dorset – or for that matter anywhere else in Britain. In summer the beach is a two-minute walk and I love to swim; in winter the south-westerlies rattle the windows and boom in the chimney, and I’m glad of my fire and the thick stone walls.
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.
February 22nd, 2010
Big day today: my father arrives home from the hospice. My parents’ house has been filling with equipment since the middle of last week (electric bed, lightweight wheelchair, ventilators and tanks of liquid oxygen…) but now the day has finally arrived. Everyone’s quite nervous about it, not least my father himself, which is hardly surprising, especially given how cosseted he’s been at the Joseph Weld Hospice in Dorchester – with nurses on call 24 hours a day, excellent food, wine with his lunch, afternoon cakes and (best of all) custard and ice-cream with every meal. Talk about keeping a man happy…
February 22nd, 2010
Caring for someone you love who is dying is, oddly, a bit like being in love. There’s the same desire to spend as much time as possible together, but more than that, it gives you the same strange moments of heightened reality, when just looking up in the sky and seeing white clouds or a bird flying overhead can bring you to the edge of tears.
It’s funny that death isn’t more integrated into our lives today, since it’s just as integral to life as, say, giving birth – except of course one is intensely sad and the other, on the whole, is something to celebrate. Yet we celebrate death, too, in a way, by remembering the life of the person we’ve lost.
February 18th, 2010
Apologies to anyone who’s been checking my website over the last few weeks for the lack of posts: my father was rushed to hospital in the New Year and has been diagnosed with motor neurone disease, so life’s been turned upside down for all the family while we try and look after him as best we can. ‘Normal’ service will be resumed as soon as possible, but in the meantime I hope you’ll bear with me – sorry.
