Muses on happiness

World gone wrong: Storm and The Birds

These last few days the small town in which I live has been battered by a really vicious storm. The damage to the seafront has been serious. Walls that had been there for certainly thirty years and probably longer have been destroyed. Yesterday half the town had been closed off by the police and we saw why. The waves were pouring over a wall and had knocked over the large containers for separating waste which were floating down the road to a beach that it is a little lower down. Miquel, a retired fisherman in his 70s told me he had never seen anything like it in all his life. Yesterday I didn’t have my camera with me, but today I went out and took photos, at least until my camera stopped working, probably blocked up with all the salt in the air!!

One of the last beaches I visited, Montgó, made  me so sad, and perhaps it’s as well that I wasn’t able to take photos.  A close friend of mine who passed away just six weeks ago had been the councillor responsible for the remodeling of the beach with a beautiful promenade, full of seats and young trees which opened just a few months ago. There was a life-saving hut on the beach with a look-out perch on top, like you see in Baywatch. And it’s ALL GONE:-( The hut was washed up and broken, the promenade was covered in mud and sand. I don’t suppose we’ll see whether it’s damaged or not for quite some time.  Most of the lights were broken, but the most daunting thing was the hundreds of fish that had been washed up and were lying dead or flapping in the sand. So sad.

After all this I went home and had just driven into the drive when I heard a really loud noise that I had never heard before, accompanied by a sound that was like stones being dropped. I soon discovered that there were thousands of birds flying overhead, I’m not sure but they looked like swallows and they made the most incredible noise. The other noise was the olives they were dropping that they must have picked from the trees in the nearby fields. My camera had dried out by this time so I shot some more photos and a couple of videos because it really was just like the Hitchcock film.  It all ended when someone let off a very loud shot or something similar which, my pure chance, I got on the second video. I deduce that the birds had come over my house as they had probably been washed away from the nearby wetlands where they might have been wintering or getting ready to migrate further south.

I have posted two vidoes of The Birds on YouTube. Look for User: CatalanMoon