Ticking boxes in Weston-Super-Mare

Like - I should imagine - most people who believe it exists, I'm not convinced the pandemic's done with us yet, so it's a question of ticking the mother box while we can. Last week it was a trip to Nottingham with my children; this week, as she's in Weston for a few days with my niece and her fiancé, I drove down my aunties, Mollie and Janice. 

Except the trickle of relatives became a tsunami, with the two locally-based brothers and their wives joining us. Which meant that by the time I arrived in Weston with the aunts, having diverted to an industrial estate on the outskirts of the town to try to find an emergency toilet for one of them, there were six elderly people, with a combined age of 496, and my rather nonplussed niece and nephew-in-law, who weren't actually nonplussed at all for long, hooray, as they are a nurse and an OT respectively, and, although working in paediatrics, very capable indeed. 

Luckily, it wasn't raining and there was a park two minutes' walk from the rented flat, so we got everyone there by a mixture of car, wheelchair and walking stick, and my niece and her fiancé went off to get fish and chips, fruit juice and compostable plates and cutlery, while I organised another toilet run. And the fish and chips were deemed Very Good Indeed, as were the views from the park and the flat, and they all caught up with each other (with the exception of my aunts and uncle in Devon and Cornwall). And it felt good to facilitate that during this horrible Time of Separation. 

Birnbeck Pier in dire need of some love

Beach, mud, Grand pier, marine lake from the flat

Pier, mud, Brent Knoll, Brean Down

Brean Down and Steep Holm

Steep Holm, Flat Holm hidden behind the trees, and the coast of Wales

Sand Point Bleak

My favourite sort of landscape is bleak.  Not shopping centre car park or industrial estate bleak, though. My kind of bleak generally involves trees that look like this.

This specimen is to be found at Sand Point, just north of Weston-Super-Mare, where I went for a bit of a hobble on Saturday, sun and blue skies belying the chill, prevailing wind.  

Sand Bay itself boasted a set of warnings that wouldn't disgrace an Australian beach ... 

... while the Point had a rather more charming notice.

Ah look, there they are.  

There were cowslips, bugle and birdsfoot trefoil as well.  And seals.

'Look at the seals!' a couple cried as they accosted us on the ridge.  'Have you got binoculars?  There are hundreds of seals down there, coming in on the tide. We've been watching them for the last half an hour!'

I squinted in the sun. I could see what looked like very black bits of shadow on the water. I supposed they could be seals ... maybe?  'Er, thanks,' I said.

We descended from the top of the Point to a path running above the shore.  'Nah, not seals,' we'd agree, and then, as a black shape curved and lifted with a wave, 'ooh, hang on, though ... '

Back up on the ridge there were wide-ranging views over to Cardiff and Newport and upstream to Clevedon and the Severn Bridges ... 

... and in the opposite direction, and altogether closer at hand, Sand Bay itself ...

... Worlebury Hill and Birnbeck Pier ... 

... the island of Steep Holm ... 

... and Flat Holm up ahead, where Guglielmo Marconi transmitted the first wireless signals over open sea to the Welsh mainland. 

I was finding the rough terrain very challenging in places with my less than reliable ankle, so we decided to head back to the car park via a pleasant earthen path that wound around the side of the Point.

This worked really well for me until it petered out and I was confronted with a large expanse of very steep, smooth rock.  There was nothing for it but to slide down very carefully to the beach below. (This is what it looked like at the bottom.)

I wonder who lives in a house like this?

Heading back home, there were  none of the expected queues of traffic between Weston and Bristol and we were in good time for our meal out with friends.  But not before I'd opened some of my photos in Paint.  Definitely no seals.  Probably bits of black sea weed lifting with the waves, and made sharper and darker by the sun.

Come to think of it, the pain in my ankle was sharper and darker too, but a small price to pay for all that mud and salt and bleak.