Diary of a Deckhand

Now I know I don’t get to watch telly for 8 months of the year, so I can hardly be an expert on this, but am I the only person who finds some adverts so awful they make me actually avoid the product or service they are selling?

Nothing is worse than having to sit through the same price comparison site advert 10 times an evening, or seeing the same cutesy pie perfect family in their perfect house and perfect car.  Women who declare they use XYZ hair colour but if you read the small print most of them have hair extensions, utter popular science for makeup or moisturisers to make you look 10 years younger.  I don’t want to look 19! 

Shampoo with more nutritional value “contains vitamin E” than some peoples daily diet.  Hair is dead!  It cannot be nourished, let alone with a product that is in contact with it for a maximum of 3 minutes!  Want healthy hair?  Eat well so the skin where the hair follicles sprout from is well looked after and you might be onto a winner.

Help.  I am turning into Victor Meldrew.

Finally!  We have snow!  As the rest of the country grinds to a halt under nearly a foot in some places, we have a couple of inches just now but it is still falling.  Hurrah!

Anyhoo, I bought a new camera (yet another one), and these are the results from it - I love it.

The wind tugs at the tiles on the roof, howls through the branches of the contorted trees in the garden and makes the little piles of last years lost leaves dance in the corner of the garden.  Sheep huddle in whatever shelter they can find and the deer poke their noses outside their shed and reverse back in to eat hay all day.

The sea is stirred to a foaming rage, crashing onto the rocks with such unbridled fury that boulders the size of a loaf of bread are hurled onto the road which crosses the top of the beach, sand tries to reclaim the tarmac, small dunes form and bump the tyres as we cross.  But we are on a mission - interesting things get washed ashore when the sea is wild.

Struggling to walk into the howling gale, we find lobster pots, separated from the rest of the string all alone.  Buoys, their garish flourescent colouring making them stand out for miles taunt us from their precarious positions at the edge of the surf.  Bottles from all over the world, their languages a mystery to me lie amongst the black dead seaweed.  Bits of rope, bits of net, cans and always shotgun shells.  Someday children will decorate their sandcastles with the detritus from a 12 bore not a limpit.

The viking head stands around 15 feet tall, built from a colossal timber washed ashore, the holes are an aquatic wood worm, not holes from a shotgun.

And I dread to think what this was for - it is something like a landrover, with a propeller, oil drums and a church pew…..