The Oddness of Swanage

Spent a hugely entertaining evening at a perfomance of 'The Strange Sea Sighed' by Peter Cooper, Tara Dominick & Matt Wilkinson last night. The whole thing was about the wonder & oddness of Swanage, what draws us to it, keeps us here, and the surrealism that surrounds us. It was a fantastic performance, moving, humourous and inspiring.

A Thomas Hardy passage (from The Hand of Ethelberta I think) referred to the sea going folk who live their lives on the water and only have a vague concept of the areas inland. It made me think about my own preferences. I love the shore. I'm uneasy on the sea and wary of water, but when I go inland I yearn for the coast. I'm entertained by the city, but claustrophobic, and I fail entirely to see the point of the countryside as a dwelling place, other than to prevent overcrowding on the shoreline.

I like to be by the edge, and to look out from the water's edge in the safe assuredness that in front of me is a wilderness, and that as hard as we might try to bugger it up, we cannot control it. From Peveril Point (in the picture above) on a good stormy day like today, you get a real sense of the power of nature, the ferocity of the tides and currents and fuming foam that crashes and leaps on the jagged rocks stretching from the shore and you can feel the very fragility and impermanence of your tiny self, while at the same time feeling at one with something huge and forever.

The photograph above was taken on a day in early summer when the wind was singing siren songs of lost souls as it whistled through the crumbling concrete structure that hangs teetering from the cliff edge. Catching the song from some feet away, unsure of where it was coming from, the feeling was supernatural, eerie, prompting a shudder as it spoke to something deep in the human psyche that harks back to times of fireless nights in dark caves with savage beasts in the forests beyond. Beying 21st century man, I recorded the sound on an mp3 recorder, and perhaps I'll stick it up here if I can figure out how. Then I turned and walked away, pushed hard by the wind toward town and a soya latte, one sugar, in a friendly cafe.