One starts at the car park by the café (see 50.661666, -1.136405). The car park comes with a well appointed toilet block and the café, provided one gets there early enough, comes with well made rock cakes, a species of cake of which I am fond. Maybe I am prompted to attempt to make some myself.
The beach seems to be as much the preserve of caulkheads as holiday makers and as the beach to the east of the café is open to dogs, one gets rather a lot of them, particularly at weekends when the caulkheads are free to come out to play. They can be something of a nuisance, as on one occasion was an owner who was ejaculating the phrase 'good girl' at what seemed like 10 second intervals for half hours at a time. The nuisance seemed to be compounded by the subtly irritating variations in enunciation. I think he was requiring the dog in question to keep on fetching a ball from the sea.
There was a moment of hilarity however, while the Polish family on the other side of us were cooking their lunch time sausages on one of those disposable barbecues that come in a tin foil tray. One of the sausages managed to fall out of the tray onto the sand and the lady of the family picked it up, marched down to the sea and attempted to wash it: one had lurid visions of the salt water swirling, entirely ineffectively, around the sand firmly cemented to the sausage by rapidly congealing pork fat. She then resorted to brushing the sand off before returning the sausage to its rightful owner for onward consumption.
Meanwhile, a lady caulkhead sat firmly on the beach (she being a reasonably big girl) reading her mobile phone while her young daughter played around, wishing her mother would join in, and while her husband and son went for a walk to the fossils. How she could see anything in the bright sunlight was a mystery, but she also kept it up for half hours at a time.
Later in the afternoon, heading east towards Culver Cliffs, we came across a very small encampment at the foot of the cliffs, a small tent fenced in with windbreaks and which appeared to be home to someone or other. The encampment has now been there for several days, which seemed odd, given that there were much better places for a spot of freelance camping quite close to hand. What sort of a person did we have here? Did he or she have special needs?
The next day, the Polish lady had, as it were, her revenge for our amusement at her expense. The day was hot but windy and we got home from Yaverland to find very fine sand stuck all over us, sand which seemed to take an inordinate amount of soap and hot water to get off. Indeed, I am still coming across odd remnants some days later.
But a fine beach, good for both sitting and swimming. We have now clocked up three swims and aim to have some more before we are done.
And lastly, this morning, I was reading in Osbert of his introduction to the world of the visual arts, in the form of a painting owned by his father, possibly once hung at Renishaw Hall (see http://www.renishaw-hall.co.uk/), painted by George Morland and of the Duchess of Devonshire kissing a butcher in an effort to obtain his vote for her candidate, the infamous Fox, in an election at Westminster in 1793 or so. Intrigued, I asked google, to find that both the painter and the painting appear to exist, but completely failing to find an image of this painting. But I did learn that the Duchess had prompted a whole raft of prints and paintings at the time, one of which is included above, courtesy of a library in the US, perhaps the Lewis Library at Princeton. Also that unseemly pictures of celebrities were not invented by Rupert Murdoch.
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