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Several of my books are set on or beside the sea (Cabin Fever, Reluctant Date, Kissing Maggie Silver) while others are set in countryside close to the sea, including the three time travel books in my latest series (Mapleby Memories), where the sea is briefly a major player in book 3, (Many a Moon). This is probably partly because I was born in a seaside town on the south coast of the UK, partly because my grandfather was a sailor with many sea faring stories, and partly because my earliest memories feature sand blown, windswept trips to the beach.
When my husband and I married, however, we moved away from the sea and spent 25 years living close to London, so nowhere near the sea at all, although we did spend some summer days picnicking on the banks of the River Thames as it meandered its way out of London into the Buckinghamshire countryside. It wasn't the sea though, so when we learned our jobs were moving north we decided we would look for a house as close to the sea as possible. We were lucky. The house we have now lived in for 35 years was a wreck when we bought it but it's on the edge of a nature reserve with nothing between it and the sea except fields, woodland, and rolling sand hills, so all the effort that had to go into renovating it has been worth it. Living so close to the sea does, however, have drawbacks as well as responsibilities.
Out of season it is wonderful. We can walk for miles and see nothing more than one or two dog walkers in the distance. In season, every family for miles around wants to visit, and who can blame them. So we are used to the parking problems and the piles of litter that pollute the area for a couple of months of every year. And, like most local residents, we consider clearing up the mess and the occasional traffic queues a small price to pay for the fact that we are lucky enough to be able to enjoy it everyday.
Sometimes though, the problems are more serious. This year we have already taken one visitor to the local hospital when he badly burned his foot on very hot sand after he moved a portable BBQ. We have twice been custodians of car keys when cars have broken down and the owners couldn't get them collected until the following day. We have also rescued lost dogs, one of which seemed to want to stay with us indefinitely! We have invited desperate mothers with small children to use our bathroom, and filled water bottles for others. We've had to sluice down the path outside the house when a small child was violently sick. And we have advertised many lost car and house keys on our local social media site and then held them until the owners could collect them.
We also have to explain, myriad times, to families with pushchairs, wheelchairs, small children, and less than agile oldies, all wearing sliders or flip flops, that while the beach is close, it is a wild beach, so there are no paved paths, nowhere to rest on the way. No ice cream stops. No coffee shops. Just fields, woods with treacherous tree roots, and finally high sand hills to traverse before they climb down to the beach itself.
We have twice had medical helicopters land in the field right in front of our house and watched the paramedics set off at a run to rescue someone who had been badly injured. Sadly there have also been a couple of deaths, one very sad one when an elderly person with dementia was lost in the sand hills. We have reported woodland fires and watched the rapid regrowth with fascination. Seen police on sand buggies drive down to the beach to break up the occasional fight. On one of our rainy days I even found an elderly woman and her dog hunched, dripping wet, under a bush, as she desperately tried to call the emergency services. She had slipped and broken her leg and was in a lot of pain. Directing the paramedics to the spot where she'd fallen, which was in the middle of unmapped woodland, took some doing with an almost non-existent phone signal, but we managed.
We've even had to help track an out of control dog that killed a mother goose and her 3 goslings, something that involved phone calls to others as we all covered the wide area surrounding the lake where the geese had been living peacefully all summer, much to the pleasure of the local residents. That was a sad day!
Another day we had to persuade visitors to abide by the notice that asked them to keep their dogs on a lead in one part of the woodland, as a baby owl had fallen out of a tree and was being cared for on the ground by its parents until it was strong enough to fly. Most did as they were asked but some who didn't understand the unspoken countryside code were not so helpful. Fortunately the little owl soon found his wings and flew away.
And as well as all that we have to let the National Trust that manages the nature reserve know if we find dead wild animals such as squirrels, seals, foxes etc., and also if we see live ones that shouldn't be here such as grey squirrels, as the area is a red squirrel reserve. If greys invade they kill them, not physically, but by bringing in viruses that the reds can't survive. Once upon a time the smaller reds were too numerous to count until they were decimated by the greys squirrel pox. The few remaining ones were captured and quarantined for 6 months. When they were released the National Trust stopped selling the small bags of nuts that visitors bought to feed them because they had by then realised that to survive healthily in the area the population needed to be less dense, so the squirrels have now voted with their feet and moved away from the visitor area to the more varied woodland at the edges of the reserve. If you know what to look for you can find still them, so showing small children how to identify chewed pine nuts and then watching them set off on a squirrel hunt is satisfying, although I'm not sure they are always successful.
So living in such a lovely area comes with responsibilities, especially on the sort of sunny days we have been enjoying for most of the summer. But it comes with so many pleasures too, such as being able to pick wild apples, blackberries, sloes, dewberries, damsons, rosehips and buckthorn. There are even nettles for those who want to make nettle soup. And while there are wild flowers in bloom for most of the year, the bluebells that cover most of the woodland in Spring are an amazing sight. Such pleasures far outweigh the occasional emergency or upset. And because it is a wild beach, dogs are allowed to run free, and the most joyous thing is to see a dog breach a sand hill, spy the sea in the distance and race towards it without a care in the world. And every dog and dog walker becomes a friend. I don't know whether it's the feeling of freedom that comes with wildness of the countryside, the unspoilt beach and the wildlife all around, but nearly everyone says hi or stops to chat. The dogs do too. Long may it continue as it offers time out from an increasingly stressful world.
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