Time for a van service at Victory Motors in Leiston. I biked home. They are building a beautiful, expensive-looking wooden fence around the grey pre-fab office and car park with its small solar panel unit. So that we can’t see what’s going on?
Yellow trucks filling up with sand behind the metal railings I normally see at Carnival. A child’s Tonka truck play paradise. Two buzzards on a tree stump as if to say what have you done with our habitat?
What precaution have they taken against the torrential downpours that will come? The soil will wash onto the B1122 and block the road.
Traffic light on Lovers Lane. I watch the variety of European vehicles pass and breathe in their diesel fumes. A cyclist in green neon mutters “Terrible, isn’t it?” as he passes. I hang a right to Kenton Hills. The walk is still there but no longer with access to the sea or the Wetlands. I enter the Bridleway and there is another huge sand pit with a high green mesh fence like a tennis court. I was stopped from taking photographs: “But this site is the power of good, creating electricity for the nation?” “It is nuclear”. “How do I get to The Eels foot from here?” It is still a public path and they opened the gates for me. It is sand the whole way along, beautiful yellow soil, with yellow caterpillars and diggers flattening the earth and making earth mounds like a present day Sutton Hoo. A massive sand pit. We should never have let these boys play with toy trucks when they were four. On the final B1122 stretch between Church Road and Pretty Road a lorry thunders past me. “If I die now,” I say out loud, “on your head be it.”
My van passed. Biked back up the B1122 to the Lovers Lane turn off. Caterpillars fork lifting silhouetted against the setting sun and work finishes at 3.30pm on this early winter’s night. The diggers dance into a line like the zamboni at Somerset House ice rink. The decomposing badger is still in the verge.
ness365 