News from Nowhere

There's nothing like the Council withdrawing support for an event to tempt me to attend: but we didn't go to Pride last Sunday, instead we went to Amble for the Puffin Festival.



A sunny (if blowy) day at the seaside, with a small, puffin-themed fetival, what could be nicer? There may have been fewer stalls in the square than in previous years, but on the other hand we made better use of our time, catching both a poetry reading and an art exhibition. I also enjoyed chatting to the landscape photographer who has one of the little tourist shops (about light, and graduated lenses, and suchlike).

The poetry came from Katrina Porteous, reading in the micro-pub on the square: I liked Coastal erosion, which begins:

First to go is the footpath, smoking fireweed, the hawthorn
Reddening along the Grassy Banks, then the railway line
The end terraces, blackened memorials -

but moves on to consider erosion in a less literal sense. The art exhibition, a single room in the local art centre at the far end of Queen Street, was 36 Views of Coquet Island, which began as a lockdown collaboration - in fact, here it is! - allowing the widest ranging interpretation of its theme: music, photography, embroidery, a recollection of 36 Years of Roseate Tern Management...

Walking the length of Queen Street twice (there and back) also gave us a chance to admire the colourful puffins in the shop windows, contributed by the local primary schools. This, though commendable, is usually a bit repetitive, each child in the entire class producing, to the best of their ability, a copy of the same model. This year, though, each window had a selection of variations on the theme, and some of them were very creatively coloured:



The message was bad news, though. We had achieved our wider exploration of the festival by skipping lunch, and now we were ready for a sandwich and a sit-down. But, festival or no festival, it was Sunday afternoon and the shops were closed. Eventually we found ourselves back at the harbour, where Lilly's Landing provided us with perfectly good coffee and a total absence of any food that wasn't cake. Which was diappointing, but I was still well pleased with my day out.

boybear e-mailed this morning to say that, according to his computer, today is Puffin Day.

Around here, of course, every day is puffin day: I was already wearing my puffin socks. And every day is Something Day. Here's a Days of the Year website, and yes, it confirms that today is Puffin Day. It suggests that the designation originated in Iceland, but is hazy about when and how. So I'm inclined to prefer this site, which claims it for Norway.

It makes sense to celebrate puffins at this tme of year, as they return to land for the breeding season. I'm surprised / sceptical that their return to Lovund is quite so accurately predictable, weather being what it is, bu it must be about right. The Guardian has already published at least two pictures (one from the Farnes, one from Orkney) which I am failing to find, because I can't filter by date. Unexpectedly, though, The Times of India provides a pin-up gallery

Mostly, I am very snooty about Bank Holidays. I can take time off when it suits me, so why should I welcome something that creates crowds and traffic jams? Yes I know: privilege. This weekend just gone, though, did feel like a Bank Holiday weekend (and today does feel like a Monday...)

On Saturday, we went to Amble for the Puffin Festival. We had had a lovely time there last year, but this year our timing was less good. We arrived just before one o' clock, and discovered we had just missed the Bared Toed dancing puffins I had liked so much; a poetry reading by Katrina Porteous, who is always worth hearing, was not until the following day. Despite this, I enjoyed wandering around the square in the sunshine, admiring the various stalls. I bought a supply of cards, and was very tempted by a framed print (an almost abstract image of dunlins, repeated across a dark blue background like light dappling on still water) but durham_rambler reminded me how many pictures we own but have not hung...



For the record, I did not have to bully durham_rambler into posing for this picture; he tires of browsing faster than I do, and announced that he was going to sit "over there," and that I should come and take his picture when I was ready. Mindful of how busy the Old Boat House had been last year, we ate at Radcliffe's Café Bar: a fun choice of beers, several of them Belgian, and I enjoyed sampling a raft of four - but next time I'd go back to the Boat House. A visit to the RNLI shop, and a volunteer to show us their boats - and then back to Spurreli's for ice cream. We didn't make it as far as the art centre, because it was due to close at four, but we did stroll along Queen Street, where several shop windows displayed drawings of puffins by the local primary school - sadly, the children had very obviously all copied the same image, and the serried ranks of puffins, all the same size, all the same pose, all faced left.

We got home to a note through the door from the students next door: they would be celebrating a birthday with a garden party on Sunday, starting at five o' clock (and here's a mobile number, please don't escalate this). The forecast was for rain, but they erected a gazebo and, as promised, partied with loud music, loud conversation and a certain amount of squealing until eleven o' clock on the dot. Or maybe ten past, but the eleven o' clock curfew is widely observed, which is good news. As it happend, our (adult, permanent) neighbours on the other side also erected a gazebo and entertained guests underneath it. This may have made me feel a bit surrounded, but dodn't add to the noise, and mercifully no-one tried to barbecue anything, so we were spared the olfactory evidence.

Perhaps it was the feeling that Sunday was simply something to be got through that made Monday feel like a long, sunny Sunday. The highlight was probably a comedy on the radio, which made it feel like those long-ago Sunday afternoons when my college room-mate and I would do our weekly bed-making together, and listen to The Navy Lark... The comedy this time was John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme: I'm always hesitant about recommending humour, but I would certainly say that if you like this sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing you wil like: gentle and mildly surreal, with a satisfying conclusion (and oh, look! they did one last year! How did I miss that?).

Meanwhile, we persevere with the weekend crossword...

And this was in this morning's post: Angela Harding's 'Puffin at Coquet Island'.

Been there! Done that!

How did that happen? Well, by the evidence of my camera, we've been busy. We leave Pittenweem tomorrow morning, but I've made a start on the packing, so perhaps there's time for a quick summary, with a threat /
promise of more to come, as I sort through the photographs.

We spent a wet Tuesday in Crail, dodging showers and buying things (pottery ifrom the pottery, soaps for immediate use and to be enjoyed later from the pharmacy, peaches for dinner...).

On Wednesday we visited the Folk Museum in Ceres: because we had never been there before and because we were curious to see a place called Ceres (Wikipedia says the name means "place to the west" from the Gaelic Siar meaning "west", probably in relation to St Andrews). A fun museum, followed by a brief walk around the village, before we decided it was Just Too Hot, and came home to recover. Recovery aided by the arrival of helenraven, kindly conveyed by fjm, and we all decamped to eat fish at the Dory, Pittenweem's fanciest bistro.

Thursday was the day we had booked a boat trip to the Isle of May. The weather was kind to us, and the puffins were numerous, though not close. I took pictures, of course, but mostly by pushing my camera to and beyond the limits of its zoom.



Or you could just relax, and sit in the sunshine, and admire the birds at a distance as they sat on their rocky outcrop (yes, those tiny specks are puffins) or flew back and forth above us. "The place is infested with puffins!" said helenraven. "Will nobody think of the sand eels?"

Today we went to Dundee to see the Tartan exhibition at the V&A. I had not realised how close we are to Dundee here, nor that the V&A has an outpost there (in a very fancy new building, opened in 2018). The exhibition was as much fun as you might think, if not more, and the permanent collection also includes a Charles Rennie Mackintosh tea room (entire, but not alas in use as a tea room) and a linoleum elephant (by Paolozzi). When we thought we had seen all we could absorb in one day, and were walking past the Discovery on the way back to the car, Dundee managed to distract us yet again, with a collection of penguin bollards.

Tomorrow we head south, but not yet home: we have booked one more overnight, in Jedburgh.

Ten years ago, we went to Amble for the puffin festival. We had a great time; I don't know why it has taken us so long to go back. Saturday was bright and sunny, and I was feeling pretty much recovered from my cold, and a little stir crazy from all the events we had cancelled in the last week: so we headed up the coast to Amble.



We were welcomed to the festival by the cut-out puffin figures I remembered from last time - looking very spruce for their age - which made me feel very much at home. I was going to say that the festival was tiny but perfectly formed, but looking at the programme, I see how very much we just didn't do...

( Mostly we just wandered about in the sun... )

I haven't been feeling great since my booster vaccination: nothing major, and mostly the achiness they warn you about, plus a slightly upset tummy, which could be anything. It was worst about 24 hours after the jab, and had been steadily improving since, but I am taking today gently (in truth, saving my energy for a dinner date this evening with many cousins visiting Sunderland dor the match). So I have not accompanied durham_rambler to a conference about the World Heritage site; instead, I will try to make some progress with stalled posts...

So here's that long-promised explanation for the enigmatic puffin of Bridlington, which has been sitting here, ninety per cent complete but untouched for exactly a month. That's got to be a good sign ...

The explanation has already been partly over taken by events, of course, since it starts with us finally taking delivery of our new, electric car - and you know all about that! We had ordered it at the very end of last year, knowing even then that we would have to wait for it - there's a world chip shortage, and it had to be imported from China - but expecting delivery in the spring... Then we thought we'd have it by midsummer: we certainly hadn't planned to drive the old car all the way to the north coast, and doing so gave us a few anxious moments. After that, we gave up expecting anything: it would arrive when it arrived... And finally in September it did arrive, and of course we had to try it out.

So we planned a short jaunt, nothing ambitious, well within its range, with an overnight and some seaside... And it just so happens that the tourism organisations for the Yorkshire coast (I was very happy to learn that there is once again an East Riding Council) were attempting to prolong the season with a Puffin Trail. This isn't an original idea: you distribute a number of blank - I suppose you can call them sculptures - and invite artists to decorate them, and visitors to collect them. I've seen elephants in the past, and Paddington Bears. But as we know, puffins are best ...

We started at the most northerly point of the trail. Sarah Dalton's The Balance of Threat and Hope is stationed at the RSPB visitor centre at Bempton Cliffs - that is, the point on the trail where you can, in season, see actual puffins:



It's one of the subtler designs: from a distance the painting is realistic, but close-up you can see fishing fleets, wind turbines, sand eels, suggestions of the threats and hopes ahead. It meets the brief given to the artists (the three themes were endangered wildlife of the coasts and seas, global warming and green energy, and people and stories of the East Yorkshire coast) but it treats the bird as a subject in its own right, not just a canvas. The puffins get stranger, and some of them wear it better than others...

( Evidence under the cut )

This was the high point of the trip. We scraped up a couple more puffins, we visited a shrine to Hornsea Pottery in an outlet mall just out of town, and we obeyed our satnav and took what felt like a very long way home, and left us interestingly low on charge. But I'll end with the picture which I think is the reductio ad absurdum of photographing your lunch (chocolate and orange cake, very good, at Lily's Bearch Café), while at the same time perfectly conveying the message THAT'S ALL, FOLKS!

Well, almost everything. But not tonight...

I have admitted before that although we are apending our evenings in front of the television, mostly we are not watching the much-praised dramas (unless they are based on the work of Ann Cleeves). We watch a lot of Pointless with Alexander Armstrong and Richard Osman; we dip into Richard Osman's House of Games; and we have just watched the three installments of Alexander Armstrong's trip to Iceland. You will think that I am obsessed with these two presenters, and I will reply that no, it is the television which is obsessed with them.

My true obsession, and the reason I am posting about this, appears in that film about Iceland, in which Xander visits Heimaey:



Speed through to about 25 minutes in, just after the break, for the visit to the wildlife rescue center, and the puffins - Including the briefest blink-and-you've-missed-it film of puffins zipping about in the water.

Then they cut away to fuss over the Beluga whales. Some people have no taste.