Industrial innovation in Watchet

Sunshine deserted us this St Luke's Day, clouds, drizzle then light rain until evening. Parliamentarians gathered in the Commons to remember Sir David Amess MP, murdered by another closet jihadi going about his constituency business two days ago. He was a practicing Catholic and it was appropriate that the sitting ended with a service in St Margaret's Westminster, Parliament's Parish Church, and not in the Abbey, as was announced on the Today programme this morning. Such factual ignorance at the heart of the BBC's newsroom is inexcusable. 

Elected representatives these days are subject to so much abuse and threats to their lives ands their families, it makes their everyday job a misery and raises huge questions about the security and freedoms we regard as our birth-right. The era of social media has fostered widespread use of intemperate and abusive language in the place of reasoned debate. It reveals to extent to which many people are ignorant of the moral value of respect for others. There was a time when even nominal adherence to Christian faith made a difference to how people speak and act. The country now pays the price for mass apostasy.

I went to the harbour this morning and for the first time noticed the island of Steepholm out in the Bristol Channel, through the port opening, north east of Watchet. Normally we view it, looking south west from the coast path at Penarth, so it's good to see it from the opposite side. It's twice as far from here as it is from Penarth.

I prepared a pasta sauce for lunch but Clare only wanted a snack as she was scheduled to swim at two, so we kept it for the evening. After her swim, we went for a walk in light rain half way up the Mineral Line footpath to Washford before turning back. Yesterday, I noticed that behind the derelict buildings of the Wansborough Paper Mill on the valley floor below St Decumen's church, the sound of an electrical hum issued from a building and there were two new stainless steel storage tanks on the site as well. 

Intrigued by this, I did some googling when we got back and was surprised to learn that a group of bio-tech entrepreneurs calling themselves 'The Onion Collective' has launched a start up project there. This aims to process bio-mass materials using the ability of mycelium, a network of fungal threads that grow underground producing mushrooms to yield other useful by-products. It can neutralise toxins and digest certain plastics, and could provide a source of new materials for manufacture. It's an industrial research and development venture whose successful presence could attract manufacturing enterprises to the site to make use of the new raw materials produced on site. It's an interesting endeavour to regenerate a site with a 250 year old industrial history in what has become a deeply rural area living mostly off tourism.

I walked down to the quay while supper was warming up, and got chatting with a visitor who had grown up in Watchet. He had observed a smallish but powerful boat moving up and down through the water of the outer harbour on the same track. Strange to say, I'd seen the same craft doing the same in the marina yesterday, and wondered what it was doing. He said it was a way of displacing sea bed sand and silt, washed in by the tide. The craft has a high pressure hose directed into the seabed to disturb sediment, as the tide ebbs. Loosened sediment washes back out to sea and thus not allowed to accumulate and require dredging by a bigger craft. Little and often is the order of the day, letting nature do the work. 

A relaxing evening, not watching telly, or listening to music just thinking quietly.