Martin's Mag.

It’s important not to let her get a head start!

I worked, briefly, in this Bristol building over fifty years ago. It is at the junction of Bristol Bridge, Baldwin Street and High Street, at the corner of the pre-war and pre-Luftwaffe main shopping streets, now Castle Park. It was built in the nineteen sixties and surrounded a war-damaged saxon church (St Mary le Port). It housed several financial companies and the Bristol branch of the Bank of England, at a time when there was far more cash used in business. It is now empty, boarded up and, I expect, due for demolition. If there was a law which prohibited the demolition of any building until it was, say, three-hundred years old, we might take more trouble with the quality and design in the first place.

As it was:

W and G visited, partly to meet our grand-children but also to get Sall to dress a well-travelled crab. It’s a long story.

A week later, Jan and Simon, visiting from Australia, braved storm Bert to see us with Gill and Alex.

Later we all visited Rob and Soph in their Bristol house with G & A and Lizzy and her children.

Walking along the beach between Dunster and Blue Anchor in North Somerset, Sally took this picture of a row of well-camouflaged knots (or sandpipers) along the shore line. The posts are some sort of old break-water, or maybe WWII sea defences.

Natural colours on a boulder on the beach between Seaton and Beer in Dorset.

Last time we came to Ogmore we had to move our car after an hour because we couldn’t work out how to pay for more than an hour in the beach carpark.

We met MFE&L, and Esme immediately headed for the beach and the most jagged, dangerous-looking piece of rock to climb. We eventually manged to lure her back to our campervan with ice cream.

Bridgwater, in Somerset is not a normal leisure destination. It hasn’t fully recovered from it’s reputation for being “a bit smelly” due to a cellophane factory which closed in 2005. It is now a mixture of modern housing and offices, Victorian and Edwardian classic houses and public buildings, and old dilapidated industrial sites including a canal which used to take Welsh coal from the river Parrott, via the town’s marina, to Taunton. The canal and other areas are being looked after by dedicated teams of volunteers, who have a lot of work on their hands. There has been a flurry of interest in the town due to a temporary art installation by Luke Jerram in the marina called “Fallen Moon”.

STOP PRESS: The day after we visited, the moon sprang a leak and started to sink. A “Partial Eclipse” according to the local paper!

Image (c) Lee Beckford and Kelly Taylor via The Bridgwater Mercury.

Severn Beach, in South Gloucestershire, was a housing estate project in the ‘sixties, but still has echoes of past industrial activity, with its own railway station at the end of the line from Bristol, and old ferry connections to Wales and the Severn and Avon rivers. These valves, near to the Severn, were part of some pipework extending towards the Welsh coast, but far too rusty to be used now, I should imagine.

Esme loves her little brother. We’re not sure, yet, whether the feeling’s mutual.