All our usual cafes closed. The owners are using this quiet time before the students come back to repaint walls, sand floors or lay carpets. We end up in the large modern coffee shop by the Church. It is already half full with Latin American and Asian undergraduates who have returned from their Christmas holidays and now find themselves in a town that is, to all intents and purposes, shut. Their conversations are intense and laden with terms like 'module' and 'assessment '. One of them is off for an interview in the 'Hebdomodars' office. The coffee is scaldingly hot, cheap, arrives in a cup the size of a bath tub and has a mysterious taste.
Overnight the tide has brought up a mass of sea shells from the deep waters offshore. They stretch in a wide band for the full length of the beach. Before we moved here we knew next to nothing about sea shells. We'd be hard pressed to differentiate between a whelk and a limpet. Now we can recognize a Baltic tellin or a Blunt gaper.
So starts a Wednesday morning in a very quiet small town on the North Sea coast. By this time next week the population will have almost doubled and the noise levels increased ten fold. All the cafes will once again be open ... and busy.
15 comments:
2 am here. Couldn't sleep. Had to look up Baltic tellin and Blunt gaper, now added to my Dictionary of Angus Words. And what a feast for your oyster catchers and gulls.
Gail is impressed by Angus's newly acquired shell identification skills. Nobby thinks the spaniels will easily have the energy to race back down the beach too.
Also wide awake over here, far too early for my own good. But how nice that there's a post from the last wee house before Denmark to keep me entertained and googling species of birds. Lovely little things are Stonechats.
Looks like you have sent droves of us reaching for the wildlife book or internet search engine. Stonechats are unknown to us in our little corner of the south, but I really am going to have to pay more attention to shells on our beach walks and beach cleans. I wonder what dredged them all up this morning.
My grandparents used to winter in Ft. Myers Beach, FL, a sheller's paradise, and every spring when they returned home they brought a jar of shells for each of their grandchildren. My mom bought a book about shells for me and soon I was able to identify every shell in that jar. To this day, I love to gather shells when I'm at the beach.
Jake from Florida...I keep a Dictionary of Angus Words, too!
Hari Om
The sea reaffirming it's the true source of life... And inspiration. YAM xx
I am also Googling, Jake. Add Hebdomodar to my list; a "Scottish" term I had not heard. It means the unfortunate educator whose turn it is to manage the students for a week. It sounds like playground duty.
Not only does the sea on one horizon go in and out but on land the "sea" of people goes in and out.
Rarely setting foot on any of our local beaches, I've no idea if we have seashells. As it's a man-made beach (with sand from the Sahara) and the water just slops up and down a bit, with no tides, I suspect it's unlikely. I do have shells collected from beaches in Florida.
Many of the cafés and restaurants are closed here, too, but we'll have to wait until March before they open again in time for the first influx of tourists. It's always been a joke that all the proprietors are off sunning themselves in the Caribbean during the winter months!
The coffee sounds freightful, it stopped raining in Manhattan overnight.
The OED says that "hebdomodar" is obsolete, but I guess not. Wonderful word. We always called those white shells "sand dollars" - I never knew they were a type of sea urchin shell.
My son just called in from Glasgow after flying back there over the weekend. To my surprise, he began rhapsodizing about Jaffa cakes, which, of course, brought back a lot of memories from the Bob and Sophie era. He said that they are very similar to Pims, which have become the family favorite here in France.
The red roses on the tables are notes of cheer and hope on a dreary day. Just a note that although sea urchins and sand dollars are both echinoderms and quite similar, they are not the same.
The movie The Holdovers with Paul Giamatti is about that. I loved it.
What an interesting group of readers you've collected! I enjoy the comments as much as the blog!
How do you make your coffee at home? What brand and such.
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