Dancing diggers and drones hunting fishing thieves…

This one is for everyone who thinks I make up my stories and they, and the places I describe, are far-fetched. The truth is that I routinely edit out the weirder bits of life in my corner of the world. Or maybe I’m just a weirdness magnet? If so, then there are plenty of worse things that I could be and an infinite number of worse places where I could be doing it.

Being strictly honest, the diggers weren’t deliberately dancing, but they might as well have been because they were sticking their buckets in the soft earth to anchor them and then pivoting around on them with one track in the air as if they were a ballerina doing something beautiful but complicated. And there were two of them working at the same time, so if you have a writer’s imagination, then it looked like dancing. Plus, of course, I could admire their skill, and I very definitely did because they were working in a tight space and worryingly close to a sixteen-foot deep hole in the ground.

Perhaps I’m weird, or perhaps I ought to say that there’s no perhaps about it, but I love watching skilled people working and the team who are replacing the sluice channels that carry water from the salt water lagoon in Poole Park which is such a haven for birds that it’s classified as a site of special scientific interest and attracts bird watchers, out across the reclaimed land and then into the harbour are incredible. It was originally built when they reclaimed land for the railways and made the lake, and then adapted in the late 1960’s when more land was reclaimed to make my beloved Harbourside park. Now the sluice has not so much worn out as collapsed, so a local company are rebuilding it with the sort of massive diggers and cranes that would have delighted my son when he was a little boy.

Technically, it’s going to be finished by the end of next week, and the two sections of path and cycle lane will be joined up. I can’t see how it can be, so I’m assuming it’s running on Harbour Time. I like that too because I’m working on being less of a stress bunny and learning to live by the rules a lovely old gentleman of my acquaintance explained to me. Apparently, there are three things you can’t control down here. They’re the wind, the weather and the women, so you need to learn to be grateful for all of them and go with the flow. I’d add a fourth one because the men are pretty uncontrollable too, but I don’t want to control them so that’s fine. I like them, and I like the chat and the backchat and the feeling that there’s time to pause and watch the birds or talk to passers by or just be rather than do.

Going down there is like stepping out of the everyday world, and into a place where life goes more slowly, people are kind, and things happen that couldn’t happen anywhere else, so now you know that Windy Bay is based on something entirely real.

Or unreal, depending on how you look at it, because where else would you find a place where this could happen? https://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/news/25565341.poole-harbour-clam-cockle-fishery-wins-msc-award/ This is Lucy Williams’ home territory too, so you can bet that it’ll show up in one of her books soon enough.

Till then, here’s a dancing digger, and I’ll see you on Tuesday. Take care and have all the fun you can.