Bad news indeed.
Yesterday was a blistery, blustery day but sunny. Around four o’clock Rob and I decided to take a long walk. We even walked over to the other side of the port and sat on a bench and watched the sea and the passers by. As we were nearing home we say a clutch of Gendarmes’ vehicles by the crêperie. At first I thought someone might have fallen over the cliff. It’s very crumbly round here, though not too high, but high enough to do a lot of damage if you fell. As we got closer we could see that the gendarmes were collecting samples of sea water. I’d been moaning to Rob about the smell of petrol for some time. When we got to our ‘home’ stretch of beach it was all too easy to see black lumps on the water. Oil.

Later in the evening we walked back down to see what had been left by the tide. Our beach is a stony beach. The stones were covered in oozy black marks. I expect ‘cleaning’ will mean removing a lot of stones. This is usually done by the army etc. handling to ‘oil’ is not recommended for health reasons. Then there are the birds, fish, oysters and mussels. Nothing in today’s paper, but it’s not really a local one. The local news channel doesn’t do weekends. We’ll have to wait till tomorrow to find out more.