Mixed News

There's a couple of news articles for today's blog so I'll start with the more serious one first, which highlights the plight of residents on the North East coast. It's a coastline that has long been receding, but the erosion seems to have accelerated in recent years. The BBC article has some rather haunting images of collapsed roads and houses perched perilously close to the crumbling cliff edge.
I remember as a child visiting Blackgang Chine on the Isle of Wight (far from the NE I know, but its plight is similar) and seeing the remnants of a house, scattered at intervals down the cliff. My abiding memory is of a white porcelain toilet on a section of tiled floor, halfway down. It was an image that somehow made the demise of that poor house more real. Tragic though the pictures are, they do get my creative muscles twitching. I can feel the first threads of a story weaving through the old grey cells - I hope anyone who has lost their home to the sea will forgive me.
But now to the happier article. This one is from the Mail - no, it's not all right wing propaganda and bigotry, they do some interesting stuff too - and it features an ongoing 'war' between two neighbours. It's a shame Kim Jong-un doesn't take a leaf out of these people's book, because a foam fight sounds a lot more fun than thermo-nuclear war.
I'm almost tempted to move. I think neighbours like them would be fun.