BRIGHTER THAN DORIS DAY? WELL NO, DON'T BE RIDICULOUS, HOW COULD IT BE?

 So off we went for a walk at the seaside, in Brightlingsea.  I’d never been there before.  When I was doing an MA in Modern European Drama at Essex University, thereby guaranteeing my unemployability, I used to see many buses with Brightlingsea on their destination boards, but I never got on one of them.  So off we went.

 

It was a hot Sunday afternoon.  There were a lot of people walking, some more stylishly than others.  

Now I’m no body fascist, much less a fat-shamer, but I mean, really some things are just better covered up.

 It’s not only the groynes you need warning against.

There were some top quality beach huts, this one with a skull and crossbones.  Everything’s better with a skull, IMHO:

 

And on the beach we found a Henry-Moore style rock.  I’ve noticed before that on the beaches of Britain you used to find endless rocks and stones with holes going right through them.  These days there are a lot fewer.  The obvious reason is that people pick up the ones with holes and take then home and put a string through them and hang them up, but no doubt there are other possible explanations.  This one stands, or I suppose reclines, alone without need of string:

In the town there was a marker for the ‘1953 surge,’ part of the devastating East Anglian floods.

 

And there was a place to put your not quite extinguished cigarettes, which looked to me as though there had been a certain amount of after-the-fact combustion.  

 

Will it surprise you to learn that this was at the fire station?

 

And we walked in The Lozenge – a ‘nature area … bringing you closer to nature, 9am till dusk March to end of November.’

 

You know how I like maps, this one in dappled sunlight, with a teasel, was the business – mapping the bench and the bin; the important stuff:

 

The best thing about the Lozenge: me and the inamorata were the only ones there.  I suppose some people wanted to be closer to the food trucks than to nature.  And here was a gentle reminder to make up your bloody mind about what you want before you get to the front of the queue.