JURASSIC LARK

Last year, I went on holiday to East Dorset. I'd never been there before. It was wonderful. However, driving was difficult. The roads wound and twisted, then doubled back on themselves. Vegetation grew so tall on either side that you thought you were driving through a Mohican haircut. I chugged down vertiginous, twisting hills in second gear, stopping every ten yards whilst another charabanc came grinding up on the other side, managing to get past me by the thickness of the first scale on a micrometer. I read a message on the wall of St Mary’s Parish Church, East Chinnock. It was paradoxical: ‘Under the new waste regulations, we do not have a dustbin. Please take all your waste home with you and help us keep the churchyard clean and tidy.’ I thought: “Just like the EU to invent a regulation that prevents the means of enforcing it.” I visited the seaside towns of the Dorset coast. The red mudstone cliffs are so full of fossils that any minute you might come face to face with a pteranodon or quetzalcoatlus, staring down at you with a jaundiced eye. The cliffs are so soft you can etch your initials in them with a fingernail. I went to glorious Sidmouth. A notice sternly announced “Do not climb these groynes.” As if anybody would. All the while, the sun beat down on the back of my neck and the sea chortled its way up onto the nearby banks of shingle as the tide sashayed in. The deck-chair concessionaire shuffled past, the key to his kiosk dangling from his belt. A coach driver had told me the deck-chair concessionaire was a millionaire – he didn’t look like one - more like Alistair Sim on a particularly bad day.