Birthday Excursion

 This year my birthday falls on a Monday so we went out for Sunday lunch with friends.  On the actual day, it's just me:  Piglet's in school and the Good Fella is at work.  It's my fiftieth birthday, I think I deserve to have a day for me.  If, as Marilyn Monroe says in Some Like It Hot, "quarter of a century makes a girl think", then half a century must provide rich experiences for consideration.  


I decided to go to the beach.  The Good Fella thinks that going to the beach in winter is bizarre and bourgeois.  I am bizarre and bourgeois so I pack up a thermos of tea and the tartan rug and go.  

It takes about half an hour to get to Southerndown, driving along the M4 with Queen on the CD player.  I come down the hill to the beach with the final chords of Find Me Somebody to Love resounding in the car.  

Southerndown has a pebbly rocky shore and flat rocks with rock pools.  The tidal drop here is huge, when the sea is right out a sandy beach as big as a cricket pitch opens up for families to picnic and fly kites on.  It's Spring and near the top of the tide, a bright sunny day with a strong wind blowing.  The sea is slate-brown with white-cresting waves.  I scramble about the pebbly tops, looking at the fossils. 

This fossil looks like a large
mussel -yummy!  

One of these has come out
heart-shaped in the picture.   

What looks like a lump of elephant dung reminds me of London days.  I used to hear about a weirdo selling lumps of elephant dung in Brick Lane market.  Some years later I went and saw the beautiful Blaxploitation pictures of Chris Offili in the Serpentine Gallery - resting on lumps of elephant dung, and read about how he used to pretend to sell the lumps in the market as a performance art piece.  I went, too, to his amazing exhibition The Upper Room when it was first on show, such a glorious satirical pastiche of religious art.  (The elephant dung also makes me think of a writer on one of the discussion boards I go on, who used to have a picture of an elephant in a room with a white sheet over it as his profile pic, and that makes me laugh.)  

Sitting in the shelter of the car, watching the crashing waves; the seagulls rising and dipping, being sent skimming backwards by the strong winds;  a woman walking on the pebble tops with an intent frown on her face;  the tiny white walls of Porthcawl gleaming across the bay in the sunshine.  

Near the beach are the sheltered Dunraven Gardens.  I'm not sure the secret door will be open - but it is!  I walk along the paths of the old gardens, hearing the shrill cries of people calling to their badly behaved dogs and truant children, then back along the clifftops.  The wind is so strong I have to lean into it and when it drops suddenly I nearly fall over.  

A cup of tea and a slice of cake in the car before I go home (listening to the Rolling Stones).  I've got the A from 'PARTY' off my cake - for my first name (that's "Anthropological"!).