It’s the first day of summer. My phone said so when the network tried to change the time. So did my PC and my PDA. My iBook was strangely silent on the matter, but she seems to have updated her clock without complaint, so I guess it must be true.

Anyhow, regardless of the grey skies that called for a trip out - coffee in flask, camera in bag and tripod in hand.

So I put on my muddiest boots and headed for Dengie marshes. There was a story in the paper a few weeks ago about a man who had murdered his friend and then dropped the body from a plane into the marshes. He’d not noticed, apparently, that the tide was very low, and so rather than sinking into the mud the body had just laid there, half in the water and half out. It was found very quickly.

The story was accompanied by a picture of the paths running through the marshes, which looked kind of interesting, so I set out to investigate.

Somehow, though, I never found the path. I found the edge of the marshes, being whipped by the strong cold wind, and I walked for an hour and a half in either direction, arriving back at the car tired and full of mud. (Although not, it has to be said, nearly as full of mud as the man crawling through the marsh on his hands and knees picking at the topsoil as though he’d lost a contact lens).

As it turned out, it was barely worth taking the camera at all, as the most interesting thing I found to photograph was the leichen growing on an old pier that stretched out into the mud. Close up, though, it looked like the trumpets of daffodils, which made them the most spring-like thing I saw all day.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 28th, 2004 at 11:17 pm and is filed under Picture story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.