The South West Coast Path is closed along the West Weares, which is my favourite bit of Portland.  A huge crack has opened up and if it turns into a landslide when you walk along it, you will fall down a 300 foot cliff.

If you want to walk here, you still can but you have to detour through Tout Quarry, which has the benefit of being sheltered, with Anthony Gormley's Man Falling to look at, but it doesn't have the jaw dropping views you get from the West Weares and you can't see Chesil Beach at all.  I miss this walk, as it's one of my regular routes and the quickest way to get to the gym on foot.

The upside is that the number of suicides may go down.  The West Weares has three or four jumpers a year and there are a couple of places with memorials and flowers.  A spot for a lad called Browner had a bottle of beer left out last time we walked by.  Every year the islanders play a game of cricket in his memory.

Guillemots in trouble at Chesil Beach

Hundreds of dead or struggling guillemots coated in a sticky, transparent goo landed on Chesil Beach last Wednesday.  The survivors were taken to a bird sanctuary where they are being washed with margarine  then Fairy Liquid.  If they live, they will have to wait until their waterproofing returns before they are put back in the sea.
Nobody knows what the stuff is and there is no sign of a slick on the water or the beach.  There's talk of it being Palm Oil, which is ironic, as we are fighting to stop a Palm Oil Plant being built in the area.
Anyway, we've been on the National News and the BBC were looking for a local eye-witness, so I ran down to the beach on Friday morning but couldn't see anything except for a huge television news truck with a satellite dish on top.  The surfers were out at Chesil Cove.  They were't afraid of getting coated in sticky goo.