BEACHES SHUT OVER SPLINTER FEARS

A couple of days ago, I was driving along the front at Worthing and saw for the first time the amazing spectacle of the drifts of wooden planks washed up in the recent shipwreck. This was days into the operation to clear the spill and long after sunset, yet the timber loomed unignorably two storeys into the air for minutes of my driving at thirty miles an hour alongside the beach. The mad scale of it doesn’t come across in the pictures in the papers or online. It’s like the Gods are playing pick-up sticks. If you live in the area and haven’t seen the wood mountains yet (and if they haven’t been cleared up) then I recommend you check them out. They’re awe inspiring in a way that crappy contemporary artists wish their Tate Modern turbine room gimmicks were.

I’ve linked to “The Truck Driver’s Gear Change Hall Of Shame” before, but this morning I choked on a bagel when I heard the tail end of Rod Stewart’s cover of I Don’t Want To Talk About It, so ugly was the key shift at the end, which gave me an excuse to bounce over there and read the relevant page, where there’s also a rant about Ben Elton and dodgy compilation musicals in general. Also worth reading—despite being rather too forgiving of Oasis—is Dominic Pedler’s muso’s intro to the TDGC, which I’d not seen before.