03-Mar-2022
I'm repeating myself, but I'm so enjoying being here...
I love the way Manx Radio tells you that the boat has arrived, and makes sure you know when the tides are, and when the sun is rising and setting, and how high and fast the waves are.
I love that we're exploring places I've not set foot in for years:
The steps down to the old baths. In my youthful swimming days, they'd already been superseded by a spanking new complex (now gone) at the end of the prom. But I used to come to these tidal baths with my father sometimes
Raining again by now, but the sheen on the rock was exquisite
I'm also loving the food...
Another round of kipper baps, this time from the Peel Breakwater Kiosk
This place occupies a lovely, sheltered spot, so we were able to eat our kippers outside, despite the dullness of the day
Still raining when we entered the Davison's ice cream phase of the day, but -- following the practice of the trippers of old -- we ate our waffle cones in a shelter on Peel prom
And I value the reminders of the past:
The Salisbury, one of Douglas's former grand hotels
Memorials to the victims of the Summerland tragedy of 1973. My family had talked about visiting that evening...
Near these memorials, there's a statue of novelist and MHK Sir Hall Caine (1853-1931):
Inevitably, the whole tenor of the extended trip down memory lane that I'm currently embarked on sent me scurrying back into my diary to find what I'd thought about the one Hall Caine novel I'd read, back in New Zealand, when 2001 was morphing into 2002. It was called The Eternal City; it was published in 1901; and the inscription in the front of my second-hand copy read: "To Charlotte, from her loving sister Bel, 1902." Ah, you don't get that with electronic books...
My IR career was by then turning from media to academia, and I wrote, a little superciliously, of the hero: "It is interesting reading about this political radical through the spectacles of my IR theory. I once would have found his ideals noble. Now I just see them as the type of thing that doomed us to the Second World War and the grip of realism." A few days later, I'm not happy with the fate of the heroine either: "Of course, she dies. It's a turn-of-the-century melodrama, after all. There's no pleasing me. I don't like happy endings, and I don't like unhappy ones."
Despite this sniffiness, I note that Hall Caine's work is available on Project Gutenberg, so I might just revisit...
In sum, despite the direness of the news and the extraordinary iffiness of the weather, all is good with our visit...
The light... The hope that there will be sunshine after the rain... This was taken from our Kionslieu Reservoir loop, which is a handy circuit if the rain makes you feel like you want to walk but you don't want to walk too far
This is also the track that offers the best views of "our" waterfall