Monday 28th December 2015

Sunday

I should point out that after yesterday's post, I may sound a tad ungrateful. Nothing could be firther from the truth, I love pointless expressions of love and friendship. Its just that despite being my Mother, she knows so little about what I like and what I am as a person. That my sister-in-law who I have seen less than Mother this year knows how to tick the boxes in that she bought me a splendid die cast model of a steam locomotive. Just the sort of thing I like. A couple of years ago, she ordered a load of stuff from the Norwich online shop; that she is a Gooner and for years City send her nice up to date catalogues is another thing.

Mum called last night, and asked if I liked the gifts; the nuggat and the 'luxury' hamper. Turned out she calls up her catalogue and in the welcome message goes through deals of the day; and it is several of these deals that she bought. I hate to see money wasted, you know. At least Jools likes the nuggat, the small bag of peanuts will vanish tonight when we watch the third series of THe Bridge. I can take the small box of ten tea bags to Denmark when I travel. The two small pieces of fruit cake has already been thrown out, as we still have one and a half cake still to eat here.

There you go.

It has been mild. Very mild. So mild that spring flowers are if not blooming, but close to it. In places summer flowers are still in flower. I hear it is the same in North America too, where cherry blossom is in flower in Washington, and one of my Flickr contacts said that last year it was minus 15, this year plus 15. It is crazy, and the wind is set firmly from the south. It is great for us, but in the north of England they have had toeential rain, many inches, with floods in Lancashire and no Yorkshire. Storms do batter us from to time; indeed on Christmas Eve a combination of storms and spring tides caused damage to the sea wall on which the main line between Dover and Folkestone runs, to close. More bad weather over Christmas meant that the sea wall has sevre cracks and the line has been closed. It seems to be replaced, and no trains will run on the line before the end of February.

After breakfast we drive down to the cruise terminal and once paid for the parking, we grab our wet weather gear and a camera for the walk along the beach. As soon as we step onto the beach, a spotty herbert in an NR van warns us to keep from the sea wall as it is expected to collapse. And halfway along the beach one of the twenty plus members of the orange army also warns us about the risk to life and not to go too close to the sea wall. We see straight away that about two metres of vertical height have been lost for the beach. The foundations of the sea wall have been exposed, and the beach itself now has a different profile.

At the far end near to the bridge, is where the cracks in the sea wall can be seen, there is also a two metre drop from the bottom step of the bride onto the new beach. Where the sea, even at low tide, gets too close to the sea wall, we stop and turn round, but we also see many structures have also been uncovered from the beach, maybe even a legendary WW2 defence system, and there is blocks of brickwork laying around.

We drive back home for breakfast and ponder what to do for the rest of the day. It seems nothing is the plan. I watch the rest of the football from the previous evening, then an Aardman animation, The Farmer's Llamas. I then get sleepy so take to bed for a couple of hours and even grab an hours sleep.

For dinner I warm up some of the Christmas chicken, boil some fresh veg and so we have another roast, which takes about an hour to prepare and make, which is pretty darn good. And like that the evening peters out, there is nothing on TV, and once we have listened to Desert Island Discs, we are all up to date with our listening. We do watch the news at ten, with scenes of flooding in Leeds, York as well as the clean up in Lancashire. The PM sounds sympathetic, but then ha has cut spending on food defences by 20%: how does he sleep?