Wild day, wild light.

I managed to sneak off from the house, camera in hand, for an afternoon just before Christmas, so I jumped on the Dart train south along the coast with the idea of taking a few shots in an out-of-season-by-the-sea kind of style. It was a day or two before the snow came and I could feel the change in the weather; an arctic wind biting into me from the east, though the sun burned low in the sky. Once I was on the train, heavy cloud began to pile up and hung just above the horizon. My plan was to head out to Bray in the hope that I'd find some leftover detritus from the summer season. An old fairground ride, rusting gently on the seafront, some deckchairs piled wearily on the promenade sagging slowly until the summer came to rescue them, that kind of thing. Me old mucker Ian had done something similar at Bournemouth pier and posted it on his blog (http://photographerberkshire.org/) recently and I wanted to find my own slant (steal his idea) on the theme.

Halfway down the line, the train stopped at Blackrock station and I saw, lowering over the wall which divides the tracks from the seashore, a hulking, rusting edifice. Paint cracked and peeling, fatigued metal rotting, grafitti emblazoned -

well, it'd be rude not to, wouldn't it? So I leapt from the train with the skill and agility of a forty-year old man on a cold day, and tried to get a better view. It was clear that the tower was an old diving platform that belonged to a crumbling, disused open air swimming pool, serviced with water from the sea. Unfortunately it was also clear that I would not be able to get close to it: the pool was surrounded by 20 foot walls, and my telescopic, back-pocket bat-ladder was at the dry cleaners, so I had to content myself with getting a shot from the footbridge that

spanned the tracks.

Mark my words, though: I will be back...

The rusting diving tower at Blackrock

Back on the train, the clouds were getting heavier, but with the sunlight still strong and low behind me, there was a fabulous dramatic feel that I wanted to try and capture, so I forgot about the seaside resort idea, disembarked at Dalkey, and just let the play of light and cloud determine what shots I took. Here's a few of the results...