This morning an ironclad mechanized Canute lumbered back and forth across the Southbourne sands engaged in man's timeless battle with nature and her elements. I've lived locally since I was four, and have seen man endlessly struggle to control of the intertidal, to stop the cliffs and sea being reunited. Periodically a huge and expensive campaign is waged, pumping sand from out in the bay on to the beach, building ever stronger, larger groynes to mitigate long shore drift, and building defences of rock and bolder filled gabion. It only serves to slow the inevitable. Every year the ironclad mechanized Canutes work tirelessly through the stormy months keeping the sand where man wants it, on the beach, a buffer between land and sea. Of course it's futile, nature has the upper hand, it's her playing field and the sand will soon be stripped. I wonder if the dinosaurs though they were all that, before they found them selves extinct that is.
