Auld Lang Sine - the crashing waves

Awoken early due to an appointment with the tide tables. It was quite pleasant outside and there was no sign of the rain we were relying on to a) scare away any fossil-hunting competitors and b) to wash the prehistoric mud off the plentiful fossils we hoped to find sticking out of the recently collapsed cliffs.
Made it onto the road by 0910 and were making sensible time in the drizzle that had started when a Police car, ambulance and fire engine, all wooo-ing and flashing, screamed past in the opposite direction to where we'd just come from: clearly a multiple vehicle accident we'd missed being in by a couple of minutes.

Past Dorchester and on the Bridport road (just where it says "Area prone to fog") we were driving through a torrential monsoon coming out of a cloud we were actually in. Splendid stuff, we thought to ourselves. Sure enough, the beach was deserted. Only a lonely sign berating us for making it even that far and some eerily empty Wellington boots greeted us as we strode across the shingle, an angry sea with crashing waves to our left, and some cliffs of 200 million-year-old mud to our right. The mud was unstable. It was positively hysterical as rivers of mucilaginous goo came down from above, staining the very shingle grey.

Landslides and mudslips, large and small, happened before our very eyes as we kept as far from them as possible. We found a few bits, in fact the ABC of Jurassic fossils - Ammonites, Belemnites and Crinoids (a whole load of crinoids)  and some pretty pyritic nodules (wooargh, look at the nodules on that) but nowhere near as much as last time. The collapsed cliffs were glutinous, the rain was that special sort that goes in your ears, and we were soaked through to the skin, couldn't even wipe the camera lens clean. It was clear to us that sections of cliff in the 60 x 60 metre region had collapsed onto the beach within the last 1 day, and remembered the local woman who was killed here by a mud-valanche only last week. Rolling rocks bigger than us had made it down to the shoreline. Just above my head you can see one of the two remaining "Danger cliff falls" signs, the others having been lost in landslips.Then I got cold so we went back.

Mr Planner had got me a complete change of clothes ready with towel aforethought. So I stripped off in the car and changed into a new man. Luckily the car windows steamed up so the gaggle of German fifty-something hikers from Seatown Holiday Camp could not guffaw at my vinkle. Then he did the same with some clothes he'd prepared earlier (sadly not including pants) and so Captain Commando and Crown Prince Mungleton sailed on outta there and got back on the Dorchester Road. Straight away we met another multiple fatality that we'd just missed being a part of on the way in, the twisted cars still steaming gently in the same cloud we were still in.

Stopped for lunch at the Bere Regis Happy Chef, a road-restaurant of known quality with its tired salad but welcome warmth. Watched a film about Gnomes in love to a soundtrack by Elton John. Welcomed my special Crash Test Mummy 'Jof' back with extra hugs.