Beachy Head

I was standing on Beachy Head yesterday, looking out to sea with the sun in my eyes.  It was like looking into another dimension.

I can understand why people take one more step. I could feel the pull.

Beachy Head Again

We ate a packed lunch in one of the car parks a short walk back from the headland. Here's the view we had westwards towards the Birling Gap-



And this was the view inland



The Range Rover belonging to the Beachy Head Chaplaincy drove past at least twice. I Googled the information and it seems there are around 20 suicides a year.

The edge isn't fenced off. The Daily Mail likes to go "Tut-tut" over pictures of people teetering on the brink. Silly, stuffy old Mail!  Have their journalists never been young? I'd be a teeterer myself if I weren't so scared of heights. There are more important things in life than health and safety.

Actually, I did get quite close. Then the shuddering began and I backed away. Here's a picture of some flowers clinging to the very last inch of England.

Three Different Things

1. The birds in the garden were making a terrific racket. Magpies mainly, but the crows out in the field were joining in. I got up to see what they were shouting about- or at- and saw a fox on the edge of the lawn with a squirrel in its jaws. The fox clocked me and whisked off into the shrubbery- and  the birds quieted down.

2. This book I'm reading (Dolores Cannon: Convoluted Universe part III) explains how various different animals see the world. Cats, apparently,  see energy patterns before they see forms. We humans appear to them as a swirl of colours- and only afterwards as what we think of as our proper shapes. That's why they can "see" ghosts when we can't. It also explains why Marlowe doesn't seem to recognise me if we meet by chance outside- and is inclined to run away until I call to him or make a "Ch-ch" noise.

3. I was between wake and sleep and suddenly there was this woman standing right in front of me- face to face. It was an encounter but not a meeting,  as if she saw what she expected to see- as if I was seeing her- or she was seeing me- in a mirror. She seemed like a real personality- and not just a generic dream-type person; put it this way,  I'd know her if I saw her again. She had a broad, handsome, hardworked face- weathered and tired around the eyes. I couldn't see what she was wearing but I intuited some sort of simple dress or smock. Her hair was pulled back and, presumably, fastenened somehow round the back of her head. She looked Northern European,  in her late twenties or early thirties and not of our present time frame. If you pushed me I say she was Scandanavian or possibly Russian and living around the year 1900.