A delightful day of nothing very much at all. Jack and I eventually left the house. The weather momentarily relented, showing us shafts of sun through dark clouds and hard wind. We jumped in the car and drove west to Corbière, that windswept lighthouse on the west coast of the island, banked into dramatic rocks and tides, pointing towards the sunset.
The wind was on the attack, blowing thick spume across the causeway. These huge sharp rocks that push up from the sea bed – the granite that makes up so many of the houses here – you need to go to edges to really see how this little island is just thrust up from the sea – just a huge protruding rock. We have seeded it with buildings while the wind seeded it with life. Strange things find shelter here and grow. Max and I found a dead egret in the rocks here once. If it had lived a bit longer, and a companion had blown here, we would have egrets. As it is we still have lots of strange fauna, lots of unusual flora, dumped here by the wind and the gulf stream.
We had a few hours before the tide shut us off to wander the rocks near Corbière. We crossed to the lighthouse. “The automatic tide siren is broken,” it tells us, and I know how easy it is in Jersey to underestimate the speed of the tide. Not wanting to have to spend the night trying to break into one of the lighthouse sheds as the sea ripped around us, we came back to the landward side of the causeway reasonably quickly. “Actors playing Scrooge and Marley in Jersey Christmas Carol forced to spend a night in the lighthouse,” is not the first coverage I want to see in the Jersey Evening Post. We returned home enervated from the buffeting wind and ready to cook a communal meal.
This is the last evening we will get that isn’t a Monday, until Christmas. Work is about to switch on hard. I’m so glad of it too. It’s what I signed up for, all those years ago when I auditioned for drama school. Hard work doing pretendy things. I slammed a jacket on and recorded a self tape on the return from the lighthouse. Scrooge doesn’t care about grooming so I am looking a little wilder than the part I was reading for. Let’s see where it falls.
This evening we made a roast. Chicken with most of the trimmings. Lots of veg. We lit the woodburner again. And we cosied up together, Jack and I, in the IKEA flat. It’s always been a good working and playing relationship, the two of us. We have another month and we are about to hit the run, when the nature of the day changes.
Tech tomorrow. Then we open on Tuesday. It’s not midnight yet and I’m in bed. Goodnight.
AlBarclay 