Shoreham Life
Shingle beauty on Shoreham Beach
I’m lucky enough to live less than five minutes' walk from a stunning beach. I know pebble and shingle beaches get a bad rep, but this sort of shingle beach really becomes epically beautiful when summer hits, and the beach flora comes to life.
Morning coffee
Enjoying a Tom Foolery coffee while catching up on e-mail and feeds on this beautiful morning…
Summer's start on the Beach
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Summer finally hit the south coast over the weekend, and I was fortunate enough to spend a good section of my three day weekend with my daughter on the beach. Friday was a quiet day, as you might expect, with Hazel enjoying exploring the abundant plant life that grows on Shoreham Beach’s rare shingle habitat.
By Sunday, the little one was quite surprised when she toddled onto the beach. She’s used to us having it largely to ourselves, bar a few dog walkers (“doggies!"), and the beach, while not packed, was certainly busy. Quite a few of the visitors had decided to take advantage of the weather by stripping off to shorts to swimwear, which led to a lot of pointing and cries of “rudie nudie!” from the little one. Toddlers lack social graces, it appears.
Still, an idyllic couple of hours, exploring the Beach, throwing pebbles into the water and watching the boats go by. While pointing out the “rudie nudies”, of course.
Beach Blooms
The beginning of summer beings blooms into life on Shoreham Beach’s shingle beach habitat.
Views from the Adur Ferry Bridge
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Two mornings a week, I walk over the Adur Ferry Bridge to take my little girl to nursery. And then, in the late afternoon, I do the same again.
Sometimes the views are just stunning. Here’s my favourite five images from the walk this month…
Summer's tasks begin
A homeowner.
A dad.
Doing the lawn on a Sunday afternoon, while my daughter plays on a blanket.
I’m middle-aged.
I’m happy.
It's Fnordday, right? Yeah, I think that's it.
My sense of time is slipping, sucked away by a baby’s obliviousness to such things. Being self-employed is great. If I was still a corporate type, I'd be back at work by now, not spending time with my daughter, while getting work done at home. But it has its issues. Like my daughter and my wife, I no longer have a clear idea of what day of the week it is. For example, yesterday I decided I really needed a haircut, and made my first baby-free expedition out of the house this week. I strolled across the footbridge, stopped off at the patisserie for a treat, and arrived at my barber.
Oh. Wednesday. They're shut on Wednesday. Still. Can't waste the trip.
Coffee in Hector's Shed. They do a mean Americano in there. And the walk was good for me, right?
Early Morning Adur Stillness
I was out of the house at 6am on Tuesday, to hit the FT Mobile event. The Adur was so beautifully stil in the early morning light, that I couldn’t resist grabbing some photos.
The melancholy fate of the Shoreham starfish
A weekend walk along Shoreham Beach threw up this melancholy sight. Dozens of starfish on the beach, amongst empty mussels shells, and the remains of filleted fish. Personally, I suspect that the lot were thrown over the side of a boat and washed ashore on the beach.
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Evening light over the Adur
I spent last Friday at dConstruct, a conference held just down the coast in Brifghton. As I walked home from Shoreham station, the mist was just beginning to descend over the Adur, as the evening light turned orange. The quality of light that resulted was just breathtaking. Luckily, I had my DSLR with me, from my conference liveblogging, and I grabbed a few images before the light passed:
Such a lovely part of the world to come home to.
Saturday's fine for Shoreham flying
Despite the dire warnings of rain and general unpleasantness, today dawned bright and fine in Shoreham-by-Sea, which must have been a great relief to the organisers of the airshow. Sadly, we were too busy to attend this year, but we were treated to a free show as we walked from the Beach over to the town this afternoon:
[vimeo [www.vimeo.com/27949766](http://www.vimeo.com/27949766) w=530&h=298]
Sorry for the very amateur hour footage. Pointing a small caera at the sky and getting decent results is harder than I imagined… My respect for my FlightGlobal colleagues goes up.
Beach (plant) Life
One of my favourite features of Shoreham Beach is its plant life. As barren as it looks in winter, come the spring it burts into a riot of colour and life. I missed the best of it this year, but I thought even the fading beauty of early summer was worth recording:
[vimeo [www.vimeo.com/26971752](http://www.vimeo.com/26971752) w=550&h=309]
Daily Vignette #2: Beach Life
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A quiet moment to destress your afternoon.
Daily Vignette #1: Shoreham Saturday
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Another little project for myself: shoot short vignettes capturing the feel or an aspect of a day in under 30 seconds. This was yesterday’s.
Wonder how long this one will last? :-)
The original idea was to have these as "motion photographs" and post them to Flickr. And then I remembered that Flickr hasn't yet got its act together to provide iPad and iPhone compatible video yet, so I went with Vimeo instead.