Shifting sand

After breakfast I collected Patricia from the bus stop and drove to the CAMEO coffee morning in San Pedro. There were just seven of us, hlaf the usual number, but then it is August when people tend to go somewhere cooler if they can. The most convenient car park is across a narrowish two lane street from the block where Cafe Tradicional is located. There's an interesting pedestrian crossing which you're obliged to use. Instead of button on  a post beside the crossing, there are strips of motion sensing lights embedded in the pavement approach to activate a change in the traffic lights. The strip is red when the traffic is flowing, green when you're allowed to cross. You have just fifteen seconds to cross when the pavement lights turn green. No warning sound while you cross. Is this quite enough time for older slow moving pedestrians I wonder? A clever idea, but still a work in progress if pedestrian safety is taken seriously.

I cooked another large chick pea and veggie stew for lunch, enough to last me three days. Then I recorded and edited next week's Morning Prayer audio during the heat of the afternoon, before going for an evening walk, This past couple of weeks there's been a huge mechanical digger on the Playa Seghers, together with large sections of black piping. It was difficult to work out for what purpose the pipe was being laid in the sand. 

I've noticed that the positioning of the digger and the cordoned off work area has changed, moving east on the Playa del Cristo. I asked Patricia what was going on and she explained that sand along these beaches gets washed away by winter storms, and needs replenishing, not just for holidaymakers to enjoy, but to make a first line of defence against shore-line erosion. Then I realised the off-shore sand dredger wasn't deepening a channel for craft going to and from the port, but deployed to move sand in-shore. And this is done by pumping a fluid mix of water and stand 250m from the dredger, along the pipe line to the beach. As worked stopped for the weekend this evening there was a heap of sand on the shone next to the digger with the end of the pipeline embedded in it. Ingenious! But, a losing battle given the inevitability of rising ocean levels and more violent storms.

On telly this evening, Christopher Nolan's movie 'Dunkirk' a moving and original way to tell some of the many stories that made the defeat of the British Expeditionary force in France into an extraordinary rescue of 338,000 combatants, with the Navy's efforts supplemented by a fleet of 850 private boats over a nine day period in 1940. It finished late, but was worth watching again.