Desperate weather (26 October walk)

The morning walk on the beach today was punctuated by unexpected animals.

I’ve not really been through a whole year here, and while I see the tide rise and fall along the Don, I often wonder what happens when all the dog-walkers and courting couples and aimless drunks clear off. When I came back to the morning walks after our research time in Nepal I heard from others that a seal had appeared, dead, some ways up the beach and rotted there for a few days. Eventually the tide must have been pulled back up the beach by the waxing moon and one day it was gone.

It was dark this particular morning – the clocks have not yet gone back – and Hakunicha and I stumbled across both a stranded seal and a young guillemot, I think. It was some sort of auk-ish thing that I only saw dimly as it clambered through the dark into the sea. I remembered The Sea-Thing Child and wondered whether Russell Hoban had ever lived in Scotland: the protagonists in that story could well be the ordinary denizens of our end of Balmedie Beach. Eels, seagulls, auks. A ways further on we met a seal, quite some ways above the damp sand left by the falling tide. The seal was remarkably sure of its place – it rolled around to face us and made a perfectly clear hissing noise.

It is a part of British middle class life, to which I have been rather inefficiently glued, to wonder what would happen if one were summoned to Desert Island Discs. Friday night I remembered the idealism of a California folk/hippy musical youth, and yesterday evening I dug into what happened next. I found Chris Cutler’s page at ReR and spent the next two hours weddling (web waddling?) through Recommended Records, Hannibal Records and who knows what else. Fred Frith, Henry Kaiser, Tom Cora (I was there for a Skeleton Crew concert at Reed – I talked to Fred! – I pushed their drumkit back onto the stage when it threatened to fall off) – the West African marimba bands, who formed and reformed like the CBeebies bloblets but played four six hour sets; the Golden Palominoes, Pere Ubu, John Zorn a bit but boy was he full of himself. And now where has it all gone? I have written to Simon W-S to complain.