High Tide	05:04 (2.20m)
Low Tide	10:46 (1.10m)
High Tide	17:50 (2.20m)
Low Tide	23:34 (1.10m)

Sea temperature: 19.1 - we agreed that it's pretty much stuck here, it won't get any higher
Sea conditions: Calm, a bit murky
Weather: grey but the sun was trying very hard
Joined by: The Usual Suspects
Topics of conversation:
Bonfires - it now transpires that it wasn't just the post from our huts that has been used for bonfires on the beach but the chestnut paling has been pulled up and broken apart. This destruction is not only a nuisance but has created sharp, splintery spikes and I need to keep the dogs away, it will also mean that the whole run will need replacing, and at £5 a metre that's a proper pain. The fencing helps to keep the dunes covered in Marram grass, which in turn hold the sand together with its fibrous roots, and the dunes hold back the water. Further down the strip, where the dunes have been breached, the salt water comes in on high sides, flooding the marsh and changing the eco system entirely. At this end of the village potential flooding could have an impact on homes and grazing too.
Football - The 'Vicar's' Wife and I discussed the upcoming NCFC match, at our level obviously, which was purely about logistics of our husbands watching the games. The 'Vicar' and Mertz are 2 of the only 3 NCFC supporters in the village and he had offered Mertz his season ticket for a game this weekend - he can't go due to a wedding in the village church. Mertz had been delighted with the offer and casually mentioned to me that he was going to the game because the vicar was busy doing a wedding - I had to disappoint him by reminding him that he was doing the wedding too, albeit from the other side of the pulpit.
Oliver Bernard - Bernard, who died recently, was a brilliant, talented and wildly eccentric poet, who lived near our old house. He once spent almost a year dressed as a bishop keeping vigil at Norwich Cathederal for CND and his poem about Walberswick is deeply inspiring. He also translated Apolinaire and Rimbaud, which DK deliberately misheard and 'wondered' how hard it was to translate Sylvester Stalone's grunts into meaningful statements. I'd asked The Poet if he had access to any of the recordings of Oliver Bernard reading his own work which I've been trying to hunt down as he's, well...The Poet... Sadly neither of us has had any luck finding them yet. 

Oliver Bernard

Pam Ayres - The LE writes for Pam Ayres and was planning on getting stuck in today. She's a voice of my childhood and I'd recently been surprised to hear her on the radio being very dry. The LE told me how talented she is, and compared the humour of her poem about teeth with a little known one about loosing her dog and missing the sound of the 'tippy tappy toenails' on the floor. (It tugs at the heart strings, just read it and blubbed - I have an old dog). We mused, at length, on the way in which radio characters and voices inhabit a different part of the memory because you create the look and feel of them partly for yourself, completing the shape that the sound makes. Certain lines or voices live with you forever, sometimes in a good way, other times not. I'd had a discussion with Legs at the weekend about The Goon Show, which had been my Father's most listened to programme when I was a child, and how I'd grown up with their catchphrases being repeated over and over on long car journeys and at apposite moments, making my Mother wilt a little every time. Legs had a similar reaction to my Mother's, as her ex and his kids did the same. The LE said that when her show transferred from Radio to TV she had lots of feedback from listeners saying "WELL - they don't live in a house like that!" or "Their dog is all wrong!". (The dog was actually their dog and had his own dressing room.) Legs's Mother had similar response when she took her series Ethel and Albert, created in 1939, from radio to TV but having been introduced to both at the same time I don't have that problem. I love her show either way and I'm really looking forward to digitising the archive in the hope that I get to listen to and watch them all before they go online!

And still going strong at 97!