ajft

I saw one of my all time favourite books converted to television this evening. An English tele-movie version of Gerald Durrell's "My Family and Other Animals", of course I stayed up to watch it... found it quite annoying.

None of the characters seemed as I had pictured in my mind from so many years of reading and re-reading the book, it all seemed to light-hearted and silly and pointless, there was none of the feeling of wonder and eye-opening experience I had always envisaged from my reading of his years on Corfu.

I'd only just re-read the book a few weeks ago, its one of my "comfort" books to recapture a happy mood, now I feel I need to read it again to wash a bad taste away. I wonder how old I was when I first read his books? I seem to remember reading "Rosy is my Relative" back in 1976 when I was in the UK, or is that just my imagination?

The tide seemed a long way out again today, so our meandering walk was around where the mouth of the Erskine river should be and then off up the beach to North Lorne.

The Erskine if closed off by about ten metres of sand at the beach, I guess the water seeps through gradually, probably in both directions, although the estuary is at the highest I've ever seen it. The river is the colour of old tea and swarming with small bream — and some larger ones that John has brought home for dinner from fishing. Every day there are people lining the boardwalk hopefully dangling a line baited with bread, hauling up endless undersized fish and hoping for a bigger one....

The rock-pools were all completely exposed and accessible, but all seem much more empty than the ones I remember as a child, maybe I'm just not looking hard enough or long enough, but other than the weeds and the limpets and snails, there's not a lot there. Where are all the crabs and small fish that I remember? Is it just a different beach and rock-pools to the ones I used to visit, or has 30 more years of thousands more people really had this much effect?