...today is Beatrix Potter’s birthday. The Google insignia told me so when I finally tuned into the web, after 10 days of solitude from other temporal realities, email requests, passing and pressing and just missed deadlines.
...my right eye is playing up today- perhaps the result of overexposing these two blues to a much bigger, stronger one which has dappled my peripheral these past few weeks, immersing my sight wide horizon sea and sky.
...Beatrix used to holiday in Teignmouth, South Devon (as did John Keats, and Isadora Duncan). Nowadays it houses British holiday makers, furnishing them with donkey and carousel rides, feeding them a diet of chips, fudge and clotted cream.
Teignmouth is also a port town - the last departure point for Dartmoor granite leaving this terrain. I have been exploring the threshold between granite bedrock and its final departure point as ball clay, boarded onto great steel carriers and set forth into distant oceans to be carried into Baltic, and Pacific seas where it gets transformed into just about every domestic appliance known to us, from foam mattresses to lawnmowers.
Further north up the coast in Dawlish, the dune sand formations echo exacty those of East Qatar in the Arabian Gulf
This is the red sand that stains the skin when you swim along this coast. When I dug into thte river bed in Deancombe I scraped the red earth and Devon sandstone darkened my palms.