Monday 9 July 2012

Rain, Tides and Tourists at the Seaside

It's the start of the summer season and St Ives is filling up with tourists.  This is a conversation my daughter and her friend had with some day trippers a couple of weeks ago as they strolled along the harbour front with the sea lapping at the walls...

Tourists:  What's happened?  We came last year and there was lots of sand, and the water was right out there (points out to sea).

Daughter:  Oh, it's all this rain we've been having, it's made the sea levels rise.

Tourists: Can't your government do anything?

Daughter's friend: They were going to put a plug in the bay to drain the water out, but it's been cancelled due to the recession.

Daughter: The whole town will be under water within ten years, what with global warming.

Tourists (obviously appalled):  That's dreadful.

I've never written anything based in St Ives before, but am going to have to now, just to include that conversation.  But will anyone believe that it could actually happen?

Fact is so often stranger - and funnier - than fiction which is why stuff you make up so often works better on the page than stuff that actually happened.  But somewhere there really are people who don't know about high tide and low tide...






6 comments:

Kath McGurl said...

OMG. That is so funny. Why is it I think I can guess what part of the world they were from?

LemoUtan said...

There's at least one senior political pundit at the top of his profession in the USA who, though being tidally aware, not only does not know how tides work but who appears to believe in their essential inexplicability.

penny simpson said...

And there was the girl on Twitter yesterday who asked if Wimbledon was always held in London...

Sarah Duncan said...

Womag, and you could be right....

Paul, oh dear. And then there's creationism - or as some one put it, the debate about creationism is the same as the debate about whether the moon is made of cheese.

Penny, ouch!

Sally Zigmond said...

Not only that but they believed what your daughter and friends told them! Unbelievable.

Sarah Duncan said...

Yes - I especially liked the idea of putting a plug in the middle of the bay to drain the water out.