Ashlett Creek and the sailing club just after dawn on a beautiful cold, frosty, slightly misty, windless high tide - last October. I had checked the weather and tide times the night before and got a bit of a lucky hunch that the next mornings dawning might be interesting here. Ashlett always looks its best in the morning, and for me this was one of the best occasions.
Ashlett again looking eastwards. I was pretty excited about the reflections of the early morning airplane contrails so clearly defined in the dead still water. There was a bit of an interesting juxtaposition thing going on here between the quiet, magical calm of the water's surface and the way the vapour trail reflections were being depicted in their soft and surreal, zig zag patterns - when in fact at 30,000 feet further up, the flying machines that were making those very same patterns were blasting there way across a very busy, windy, noisy, dangerous, airspace rush hour at a thunderous 600 or so mph. In stark contrast to the hushed and tranquil scene they were painting on the mirror like water surface, down here in Ashlett Creek.
Kind of like it must have appeared to Lord Raglan's entourage of sickly sops and voyeurs at the battle of Balaclava, in the Crimean War of 1854, as they looked down at the somewhat surreal but rousing spectacle of the Light Brigade galloping nonsensically under the guns and smoke of the Russian artillery - a couple of miles away from the safety and complete detachment of their mute and distant sanctuary, high up on the Sapoune Ridge - babbling and cheering effusively at the 'dashing' sight of 'The Six Hundred' - hacking and slashing there way so gloriously and ignominiously into the next world - history - and for many of them....oblivion.
If you get my drift..?
And please, if you do genuinely get my drift - let me know - because I kind of drifted off myself there for a moment - from where I think I might have been drifting with that slightly Crimean 'strain' of thought, and you may well be able to pull me back on track, give me a good slapping, and reboot me - with very little effort required on your part. If you follow my drifting.....
Hmmm.
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