Teeny tiny surf and shrunken heads

Such is the outcome of a saunter along the beach this morning. In a wholly unusual burst of enthusiasm I went to Portobello for an amble beside the waves.

I wanted to try out some things with my camera. I have a basic digital camera and have never read the instruction book, so everything is a learning experience with it. It doesn’t help that most of the time I can’t see exactly what I’m photographing in the screen at the back of the camera.

My aim was to capture the little wavelets rippling up the beach rather than my usual expanses of sky and sea with a thin strip of land on the horizon. I produced the picture here, using Picasa which gives a collage option I’d not tried before. I like to think it gives a whole lot of otherwise boring pics more emphasis together rather than individually.

I walked up towards the far west end of the beach past the back of the car salesrooms and the cat and dog home. The returning tide scrunched the wet dogs, the weans and the winching couples into an ever decreasing patch of dry sand. I moved off the beach and decided to walk a bit further along the prom until I got hungry enough to turn back and go home to hot kale and coriander seed soup.

This was the first time I’ve ever walked along as far west as this, even though I’ve been going to Portobello all my life. My great grandfather had a large house near the beach and I was taken there for short holidays from birth. There are tatty old photographs of me shivering in the paddling pool and chasing great grandfather’s old Boxer dog in the large walled garden at the back of his house.

The house was still in the family into the late 1980's. When I took my daughter to see my, by then, elderly great aunt, this was the fifth generation of the family to spend days out at Portobello beach followed by dinner in the wonderful old kitchen, still with its black and white floor and probably original fittings.

Various members of the extended family lived in the rambling rooms in that house, and I have a curious memory which I need to check out with my mother, about a second cousin. I recall being taken into his bedroom when I was young, probably around 7 or 8, (when the cousin was a young trendy hippie in his 20’s) and being shown the weird objects he had gathered. I have a distinct vision of a pair of shrunken heads he had on display.

This was a considerable number of years before it became accepted practice to return human remains to their rightful lands, but I have to hope these were not real artefacts. On the other hand, who makes fake shrunken heads and what conceivable market could there be for them? Also, that cousin did work for a museum, so perhaps ….??