Sunday, 8 April 2012

88. 07.04.2012 Peace at Easter

Far away from the madding crowd and even further away from the maddening "we're doing Wales at Easter in our 4x4 with three spoiled whining brats and talking very loudly in very far back voices” crowd, at the right end tip of Anglesey is the beach of Penmon.
Banks of chalk dusted  pebbles, deep green rock pools made for little boys, Puffin Island  like a round bosom  looking closer than it is,  the whispering blue-green sea and further out the vortex of a white crested tide eternally  at odds with itself.
Twice a minute the lighthouse bell tolls a solitary note to warn  whoever it may concern  that it's still there. It hasn't heard of GPS navigation, but nobody seems to have had the heart to tell it yet.
The fall and rise of the gulls, Penmaenmawr over the water doing a stunning impersonation of  Table Top Mountain with a blanket of cotton wool.  There's a couple of white sails beyond the ebbing and flooding battle and the pleasure boat is doing its umpteenth voyage today.
It’s moments like these that make life so special.

On board the pleasure boat, the people who loudly hogged the window table in The Bulkley Arms,   Mr Fforbes-Tosserton, in his made to measure casual wear and  his horse faced wife Tarka,  who is determined not to enjoy herself, on account of all her friends from the pony, horse,  spa and health club having  gone skiing. She knows that at this very moment in time  they will be  apres-skiing it in Flange in Switzerland. It's not quite Cloisters, but still very expensive and upper-class and any where is better than Wales. To be brutally frank she doesn’t understand why William and Kate actually want to live here.  But thank god there’s a Waitrose on the island.
 Little Andre-Louis, Clamidia-Slyme and Rosemary-Trollope Fforbes-Tosserton  (Trollope rhymes with Penelope by the way, and Slyme rhymes with fee as in extortionate  private school fees) are all misbehaving and spoiling it for everyone else on board. Mr Fforbes-Tosserton doesn't seem to hear it. In fact he's engrossed in text messages of an adult nature with his P.A. Tarka doesn't care about the noise and just zones out. Dr Cotteril told her that all three had AD-HD but she refused to believe him. She was after all double barrelled and far too posh to have offspring with that. Only the offspring of the common and working class had that. As far as she’s concerned they are just loud, rude, don’t concentrate, can’t sit still and are a bit boisterous. No different to any of the kids in her social group really.

But that’s a long way away from the beach. These painted stones were scattered on the beach, there were hundreds of them. some with names of loved ones, some with messages, some with pictures but more than anything hearts. Hundreds of them.  Truly uplifting.

Peace at Easter. Even to Mr and Mrs Fforbes-Tosserton.

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