And Another Thing...: A Trip To Aldeburgh
...For my light lunch I had a plate heavily loaded with whitebait, served with freshly baked crusty whole-grain bread, while out on the beach the gulls enjoyed their regular daily feast donated by or stolen from the visitors who sat with their paper-wrapped fish and chips for which the town is famous...
The inimitable Arthur Loosley takes us on a tasty November trip to Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast, once the home of one of Britain's most famous Twentieth Century composers, Benjamin Britten.
Do please visit Arthur's Web sites where you will find a picture of the beach at Aldeburgh:
http://www.wordsweb.co.uk
http://groups.msn.com/wordswebforum
The sun was shining this morning and the leaves outside my window were still, after the blustery conditions in recent days. Such a day in November was too good to waste, so a trip to the coast was called for.
There is always something to enjoy at Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast. I had not been there recently, so that seemed a good place to spend my day.
The sea front, though not as crowded as at the height of the tourist season, was well attended. Families sat on the low flood wall separating the shingle from the promenade, while a little further along the coast a few sea anglers were casting their lines.
Instead of the usual cold wind from the North Sea, the breeze today was light and mild and the surface of the sea was as flat as yesterday's beer.
No such complaint in The Cross Keys, though, where I enjoyed a glass of Suffolk's best, brewed by Adnam's at Southwold, just a few miles along the coast.
For my light lunch I had a plate heavily loaded with whitebait, served with freshly baked crusty whole-grain bread, while out on the beach the gulls enjoyed their regular daily feast donated by or stolen from the visitors who sat with their paper-wrapped fish and chips for which the town is famous.
The increasing health risk posed by the birds has prompted the local council has issued a warning that if the visitors do not stop feeding them voluntarily they may have to be shot. A somewhat ambiguous message: I hope they don't mean the birds.
But the fate of the gulls is not the only controversy raging in Aldeburgh, so after lunch I strolled along the beach to the isolated stretch of shingle where Suffolk sculptor Maggi Hambling's stainless steel Scallop Shell stands in memory of the composer Benjamin Britten who lived in the town and was the moving force behind the creation of the concert hall at Snape Maltings, a few miles away.
Around the edge of the shell is the pierced inscription, 'I hear those voices which will not be drowned' - a line from Britten's 1945 opera, Peter Grimes, which recreates the 200-year old story by Aldeburgh poet George Crabbe, of a local fisherman from the now lost village of Slaughden.
Suffolk has always attracted artists of all kinds, including such famous painters as John Constable and Thomas Gainsborough, but the location chosen for the scallop shell, well out of sight of a few local residents who felt that modern art had no place in such an historic place, has also made it an ideal target for mindless graffiti artists, who can work unseen and have done so many times since it was erected on November 8, 2003.
Today though, just a few days short of its third anniversary, the surface of the shell is clean. The voices of the destructive yobs, if not drowned, seem at least to have been stilled - for the moment.
2006 Arthur Loosley
