Unsafe Crags

Did my usual Christmas walk over the sand dunes this afternoon. I think this is the earliest I've ever done it - usually it is on Christmas Eve, but last year I think it was on Boxing Day. As I head back home to Brighton tomorrow, this was the latest I was able to do it. Theoretically I suppose I could do it in the morning, as the train doesn't leave Truro until 4:30pm. I don't get into Brighton until half an hour before midnight. Just as well I don't have work the next day.
The beach was less crowded than normal - everyone still at work and school I suppose. I wanted to walk along the beach first of all, and then cut up onto the dunes, but the tide was coming in and the way was blocked.
It was a wild kind of day. Looking down from the dunes, the sea was a disturbance of foam and spray, white-boil and crash. The horizon blended into the sky, the grey of the day leveling everything into one disorientating mess. 'All the harmony of a murder' as some movie director once said, but I kind of liked it. The wind was relentless too; exhausting and continuous.
The sand dunes, as usual, were a labyrinth. I have walked them for years (since 1999) but the paths seem to shift and change each year. I came to a dead end following one such path today. It ended on an unsafe crag looking down over more unsafe crags. The thought of all these unsafe crags made mostly of sand unsettled me. The wind swept through the grasses, and the grasses kept sweeping over the paths, making them even harder to discern.
I remembered walking here with Misty, and before that, not last decade but the decade before, with Bracken. Dogs passed to memory, ghosts of old walks. I still remember Bracken's blue lead.
As I made my way further into the dunes, a sense of pleasing solitude came down -for a while anyway. The relief of being away from other people! I find the constant presence of other people to be quite exhausting - in Brighton -as with all towns and cities I suppose - there is always the presence of other people hanging in the air. Little wonder I am so fond of my late night walks - the only time it seems possible to feel a sense of solitude in Brighton.
I found St Piran's cross, and took my usual self portrait with the cross in the background. I used to think it made me look as if I was in a doom metal album shot - a lost Black Sabbath album cover perhaps, but someone pointed out that it did look like some kind of Christian rock promo poster instead. I really should compile them all together in one place. I think I am missing one photograph from the last five years or so. Line therm all up and watch myself growing older, from my mid-thirties to my approach into middle age.
Shortly after St Piran's Cross, the usual melee of dog walkers and old people and couples seemed to appear, like zombies, out of nowhere, and the spell of solitude was broken.
I headed back home and watched a programme on quantum physics with Dad.