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steepholm ([personal profile] steepholm) wrote2014-02-05 08:01 am

The View over Atlantis

Like anyone who truly loves life (I presume), I spend exorbitant amounts of time thinking about my own demise and that of everyone I love. I suppose there are worse fates than becoming part of a mythical race of people who were once said to live in the Drowned Archipelago, but I can't feel altogether easy at the disappearance of every town and city I've ever lived in. Romsey, Englefield Green, York, Cambridge, Bristol... all pass into legend, or are more likely sunk in oblivion.

Perhaps we'll be rediscovered in due course. Bristol can be the new Doggerland. Up from the millennial slime a broken tower will stand revealed by some future tide, or a pedestrian crossing unsilt itself, like Borth's new wattle walkway. Perhaps the sea will fall away again, and we'll be discovered by rabbits, weed-wound iPhones in our bony fingers.

It's not such a bad way to go, and I'd rather the curse fell on this generation than on some future cohort of our guiltless children. But I do regret the loss of the line at Dawlish, that lovely stretch of Devonian littoral, passage along which (in a chariot drawn by herring gulls) was once our bucket-and-spade portal into Cornwall.

"Logres is before you," Merriman tells Barney when he and the other Drews disembark at St Austell in Over Sea, Under Stone. Perhaps, now, he would say Lyonesse.

[identity profile] veronica-milvus.livejournal.com 2014-02-05 05:46 pm (UTC)(link)
This is why we moved from Windsor - on the Thames flood plain, to where we are now on top of the Chilterns. Well, that and the constant aircraft noise.

Although after today's hosing, I wonder if our house isn't going to slide off down the hill on its shallow foundations. That's a patio, not a fishpond!

[identity profile] steepholm.livejournal.com 2014-02-05 07:09 pm (UTC)(link)
What about the places you've been looking at up North?