Brighton Beach-UK- Rocks!

Brighton Beach

June is the start of Summer, but as I look out into the cool waters of the English channel, there's no way I am going swimming today  It's 4 seasons in 1day. You don't get climate here, you get weather, and you there's no such thing as  bad weather just bad clothing.

A lot of places claim to be unique. This one really is. Reminds me of Coney Island,USA  and New York New York---but Brighton Beach is nothing like its sandy counterpart.

Same time last year in Norway June  2, 2010

Here, you crunch along the seaside instead of walking on it—it’s pebbles all the way.


When the going was good...
...and you could leave no stone unturned
If you smell something burning, it is my future as a travel writer  going up in smoke-  the future of travel blogging  just ain't what it used to be. Sure, everything is edible somewhere(dogs, cats and rats come to mind), and I certainly visited enough inhospitable  and  exotic locations from Angkor Wat to The  Philippiness; but they're all stunts compared to the elevated sense of otherworldliness  given  by Melville, Hemingway, Conrad, Kipling and  of course Basho's nomadic pursuits, which I emulate in my own Scandinavian  version of Narrow Road to The Interior

 In 2011,  the  subject matter  is just too pedestrian, just a round-trip ticket and convenient 24 hours away.

Same Hat today as last year

Although I write  about these places like a news story, In fact, I am less surprised than I  care to admit when I see "faraway" up close. My touch and go, hit it and quit it ports of call, were actually more spiritual and mental moments than physical events. The  conclusion: No Noose is good news. The sailing life comes down to three things -- everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.


Some day I will look back at  posting  to Facebook and Blogger, feel uncomfortable and change the subject. Like drunk dialing friends, blogging  often leaves  me in a vegetative stupor--a  mouse potato in suspended animation-because social media  is somewhere else — the click and mortar-in the cloud, in the ether, worlds apart from the bricks and mortar-RL Real Life. For sure, but, more than that, the obligation to come back with something new, to report back on landscape, people, cultures, languages, foods, we'd never heard of—is getting harder each time.
 I inhale a whiff of the post mortem...shucks, Alexander the Great was said to have wept when he realized he had no more worlds to conquer. The world is flat.