Post by Dave on Jul 24, 2010 19:21:56 GMT
I think I may well be glad to get back to work next week so I can’t sit down during the day and have a rest, boy have me and my Carol walked some miles this last week. The good thing is that we can be together 24 hours of the day and never feel any need for a cross word to be said to each other and are never ever going to fall out over anything, its not something we simply want to happen and it never does.
The fact we both have had very unhappy relationships in the past with other partners is bound to play a big part in us only wanting to be happy together and never be in those situations again that caused us both so much unhappiness and pain.
But no one is perfect and I do some things Carol may not like and she does some things I may not like, at the end of the day its how we deal with such things when they do occasionally happen and more importantly what we don’t do.
Even when people are standing face to face and talking its easy sometimes to misunderstand what has been said or to take something that was said the wrong way. But standing face to face you are able to challenge what you may have misunderstood or taken the wrong way and then as quickly as it happened you are able to move on and forget all about it once you discover you heard it wrong or did indeed take it the wrong way.
Being able to quickly clear up misunderstands on a forum does not happen unless both the people are on line at the same time, we all know that many problems come about because we read a post in not the same way the writer intended it to come across and I know all too well from my own experiences using forums that what I thought I was saying in a post I made has been taken completely as something else by some.
It is something that is always going to happen, the use of smiley’s’ can often help the reader to determine the mood or tone your post was meant to be taken in but even they don’t help sometimes and one thing that does play a part in how a post is read and taken is the mood the reader is in when he first reads the post.
When I reply to Jon, Barton, Andy, Phil and even Aussie and all the others I have had the pleasure to meet and talk with face to face, I know what they look like and know in real life they are all decent people, I do believe for whatever reason, we try and get a picture in our heads of those we share time with on the forum but have never meet in real life, we so often decide the sort of person we think they are based only on what they write on a forum and you know what, we so often can get it all so wrong.
It is true that some people somehow change from the person they are as soon as they sit down behind a keyboard, I don’t know why they do that or why they feel they have a need to do so, I try at all times to be myself on here and yes some may feel I’m often far to open and share far too much of my life on a public forum, but that is just who I am as I have nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed about and no need to pretend to be anything else or anyone else other than Dave Roach.
We are all human and have feelings and I have been surprised at times how upset some have been by the way others have perceived them on a forum, I’m afraid at the end of the day its down to any user of a forum to determine themselves how others will see them and just what options they will form about them, we can all think of one or two forum users we know who do come across as say moaning complaining old gits who are never going to be happy and we then believe they must be just miserable people in real life as well, but we will never really know that for sure unless we got to know them in the real world.
In a nutshell if you come across on a forum to its other members as some know it all arrogant so and so, its because you have written your posts in that way and at the end of the day if it upsets you that you are being seen that way, then change the way you write things and come and share your views in such a way that others won’t form the wrong impressions of you.
One thing I believe in strongly and practice is to treat others as I want to be treated myself, I’m not always going to be treated the way I should be by some I know that, but that does not mean I should treat the next person I meet any differently. Nor should I ever try and offend anyone or cause them pain just because I can sit behind a keyboard and do so because I will never likely have to meet the person and face any consequences for my actions.
I fail to understand how anyone can get bad feelings boarding on almost hatred for someone they have never meet or just because of written exchanges on a forum, its as crazy to me as those who can fall in love by just sending messages over the internet and planning to get married when they have never once stood face to face. It’s no more than some romantic fantasy that likely to end only in tears and caused by the danger of just reading far too much into what may have been written or said in an internet message.
If I believed half the emails I get I would now have millions of pounds in the bank, would have some gorgeous young lady meeting me at the airport like she told me she wanted to do in her email and I never even gave her the email address in the first place.
Most lunchtimes this week when Carol and I have sat down for a bite to eat wherever we were, I checked our forum and was so pleased how busy it was and so pleased with the great posts being added to it. Then we get to today and it’s all gone wrong. There once was a time when these things happened I would really fear for the TFF, feeling damage was done that could never be put right again.
But the forum has always recovered and always will, it’s just a shame these things have to happen in the first place, to those who wrote the posts I ask only this. Do you think these are the sort of things others want to read? Do you think it does the TFF any good if someone new finds our forum and reads these sorts of things? Just what sort of impression do you think they will leave with? Do you think they will come back and visit our forum again?
We have some on here who need their heads banging together and they need to remember how they have in the past described the TFF and not forget it can be harmed as well as enhanced by what they write on it. Capitalgull often posted on here how Merse and I needed our heads banging together and we did.
We now know and understand each other so much better and have learned to get along for the good of the TFF, all we need now is for a few others to follow suit.
This weeks winner writes far too long posts at times but hey he does his best to play his part on the TFF as a member on here.
The winner is Dave
One post I made this week
It can be seen here complete with the pictures on the thread
www.torquayfansforum.com/index.cgi?board=fansphoto&action=display&thread=5867
Well it just had to be done and if only because here on the TFF we have a wonderful member who fully supports the TFF and has been such a good friend to it.
Today Carol and I spend five hours at Budleigh Salteron, that’s what it is known as these days but originally the town was named Salterne, as salt was once a thriving industry operated by the monks at the nearby priory in Otterton.
Before I go into a detailed report on our day in Budleigh Salterton, I will get my two moans out of the way first before I bring you all the best bits. First moan is to East Devon District Council, a pound for the first one hours parking in the beach car park is just fine, but a pound for every single hour after that? Have you not heard of sliding price charges so the longer you park the cheaper it gets? Anyway I fed the meter with £5 and just thought for a place that is not really a tourist trap as such it should not be charging so much for parking.
Second moan is why does Budiegh not have a decent café? It sure could do with one and I’m sure it would be very popular and do a roaring trade.
Right I feel so much better now and ready to continue, it’s been along time since I last drove down the main street of Budliegh Salerton and on the road that passes the beach as it climbs up to the top of a cliff before swinging around the left leaving any views of the beach behind. So I was rather surprised just how big the beach really is and it extends in total for 2.5 miles, from Littleham Cove to the west, to Otterhead in the east, where the River Otter meets the sea
We would have walked the whole length of the beach but did not in the end for a very good reason I will come back to that later. After parking the car in the beach car park we set off turning left and heading for the Otterhead end of the beach, this is where the beach really ends as the River otter flows into the sea, there is a great red cliff at this end of the beach and when we returned back to this point nearly five hours later, the tide had gone out and as the river level was low, some people had crossed over to the other side.
As you walk on the very high bank of the pebbles that form the beach you can see on your left the salt flats. Large salt pans were situated at the lower section of the river Otter, the pebble spit, now blocking what was once an open estuary, was a result of the great storm of 1824. The long pebbly beach now forms a natural promenade. You will see in the very first picture the waterways are all full of water and when we returned later it was all just mud and I asked Carol if I should try and walk across it, but after our time on the river Teign, I thought better of it due to the look she gave me.
When you are at the end of the beach you really notice how the beach curves around in a very large crescent shape and from the sea level you notice just how banked up the beach is and one shot I took much later on full zoom, exaggerates it rather a lot as it was taken from the sea level and show Carol sitting on a bench on the pebble spit.
Time to turn around and start walking the rest of the beach and we soon learned the beach really is four beaches in one and changes as you walk along it. The Otterhead end is best described as a tourist beach but when you get to the part of the beach at the bottom of the town, its full of very small boats that I imagine are used by locals to put lobster pots etc.
I also noticed the first of many wooden boxes and at first was unsure what they were, it soon became clear and they all contain winching gear to pull the boats out of the water and up the pebble beach.
The next part of the beach goes back to being more of a tourist beach again and then the last part changes into something completely different again but more of that later. The famous Budleigh Salterton Pebble Beds are composed of hard quartzite identical to 440 million year old rocks found in Brittany. The pebbles were formed and transported in one of the giant rivers that flowed into the Triassic dessert about 240 million years ago.
Over the last few thousand years the pebbles have been falling from the cliffs and today form the built of the beach at Budleigh Salterton. The larger cobbles and pebbles are very hard and unlike any other rock type found in Southern England. As a result they survive as they are transported along the coast by the waves. They can be found from Slapton Sands in Devon to Hastings in Kent.
Bloody amazing really they know the pebbles were transported there 240 million years ago and our useless history man could not even get right the year our club was founded or even when the South Devon League was.
We decided before we walked any further along the beach to go and get something to eat and could not find a decent café, a few tea rooms and an Indian takeaway and so we ended up getting two pasties and two cakes that we took back to the beach to eat.
At the bottom of the town you will learn that Budleigh Salterton was made famous by a painting by Sir John Everett Millais called ‘The Boyhood of Raleigh’ which was painted from the Octagon, in Fore Street, an ancient wall that is featured in the painting’s background. Today this ancient wall bears a blue plaque to commemorate the place captured by the artist
All fuelled up again it was time to walk along the second half of the beach and the part that has magnificent red cliffs that are formed of Red Devonian Sandstone. In places you can see all the pebbles packed and cemented in place, but you only need to touch any part of the cliff face to learn it feels very wet and breaks away with the slightest of touches. You should never remove any pebbles from the cliff face and a bylaw was once passed to try and stop people taking pebbles home with them from the beach itself, but there are no signs up informing you it’s against the law to do so.
I would expect most of the erosion the cliffs have suffered have been caused more by the weather than the sea itself as even the worst high tides could not reach to top of the cliffs, still it has made some very interesting shapes and patterns on the cliff face.
We walked under the cliffs for quite a long way and while we noticed the sign we took no real notice of it as we have seen such signs before and never encountered anyone walking around with no clothes on.
Carol pulled up to a Holt and said, there are people with nothing on and then said “isn’t that your mate Leigh standing there” “don’t look Carol” I shouted out but it was too late she had already got an eyeful of a very shrivelled up thingy swinging in the afternoon sun.
Time to turn around and head back toward the centre of the beach and head up and take a look at the coast path to Exmouth. On the path that goes up the side of the cliff I found myself thinking about Barton Downs and just how much he would have loved all the memorial benches that are there.
The path turned out rather boring as on both sides its all trees and bushes and you can’t even see the sea, you do come to a field called The Jubilee Field and we walked through that and was back on the narrow path again with no views. I kept saying to Carol we will just go a bit further, hoping to come to something of interest and in the end we came to a place where water was coming out off some sort of inlet and running down to the sea and I decided enough was enough as far as the coast path was concerned.
So we headed back to the beach again and walked all the way back to the Otterhead end and as the tide was now much lower I took a few more pictures. We then walked on the other side of the pebble spit right beside the salt flats and we really noticed just how high the pebble spit is. We soon found we were back at the car park and at least I got my moneys worth, so off we drove heading for home, another great and wonderful time and we are living proof that you really do not need to spend a fortune to have a really great time.
A selection of the hundred or so pictures I took today and they are in the order of the story in my post.
The fact we both have had very unhappy relationships in the past with other partners is bound to play a big part in us only wanting to be happy together and never be in those situations again that caused us both so much unhappiness and pain.
But no one is perfect and I do some things Carol may not like and she does some things I may not like, at the end of the day its how we deal with such things when they do occasionally happen and more importantly what we don’t do.
Even when people are standing face to face and talking its easy sometimes to misunderstand what has been said or to take something that was said the wrong way. But standing face to face you are able to challenge what you may have misunderstood or taken the wrong way and then as quickly as it happened you are able to move on and forget all about it once you discover you heard it wrong or did indeed take it the wrong way.
Being able to quickly clear up misunderstands on a forum does not happen unless both the people are on line at the same time, we all know that many problems come about because we read a post in not the same way the writer intended it to come across and I know all too well from my own experiences using forums that what I thought I was saying in a post I made has been taken completely as something else by some.
It is something that is always going to happen, the use of smiley’s’ can often help the reader to determine the mood or tone your post was meant to be taken in but even they don’t help sometimes and one thing that does play a part in how a post is read and taken is the mood the reader is in when he first reads the post.
When I reply to Jon, Barton, Andy, Phil and even Aussie and all the others I have had the pleasure to meet and talk with face to face, I know what they look like and know in real life they are all decent people, I do believe for whatever reason, we try and get a picture in our heads of those we share time with on the forum but have never meet in real life, we so often decide the sort of person we think they are based only on what they write on a forum and you know what, we so often can get it all so wrong.
It is true that some people somehow change from the person they are as soon as they sit down behind a keyboard, I don’t know why they do that or why they feel they have a need to do so, I try at all times to be myself on here and yes some may feel I’m often far to open and share far too much of my life on a public forum, but that is just who I am as I have nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed about and no need to pretend to be anything else or anyone else other than Dave Roach.
We are all human and have feelings and I have been surprised at times how upset some have been by the way others have perceived them on a forum, I’m afraid at the end of the day its down to any user of a forum to determine themselves how others will see them and just what options they will form about them, we can all think of one or two forum users we know who do come across as say moaning complaining old gits who are never going to be happy and we then believe they must be just miserable people in real life as well, but we will never really know that for sure unless we got to know them in the real world.
In a nutshell if you come across on a forum to its other members as some know it all arrogant so and so, its because you have written your posts in that way and at the end of the day if it upsets you that you are being seen that way, then change the way you write things and come and share your views in such a way that others won’t form the wrong impressions of you.
One thing I believe in strongly and practice is to treat others as I want to be treated myself, I’m not always going to be treated the way I should be by some I know that, but that does not mean I should treat the next person I meet any differently. Nor should I ever try and offend anyone or cause them pain just because I can sit behind a keyboard and do so because I will never likely have to meet the person and face any consequences for my actions.
I fail to understand how anyone can get bad feelings boarding on almost hatred for someone they have never meet or just because of written exchanges on a forum, its as crazy to me as those who can fall in love by just sending messages over the internet and planning to get married when they have never once stood face to face. It’s no more than some romantic fantasy that likely to end only in tears and caused by the danger of just reading far too much into what may have been written or said in an internet message.
If I believed half the emails I get I would now have millions of pounds in the bank, would have some gorgeous young lady meeting me at the airport like she told me she wanted to do in her email and I never even gave her the email address in the first place.
Most lunchtimes this week when Carol and I have sat down for a bite to eat wherever we were, I checked our forum and was so pleased how busy it was and so pleased with the great posts being added to it. Then we get to today and it’s all gone wrong. There once was a time when these things happened I would really fear for the TFF, feeling damage was done that could never be put right again.
But the forum has always recovered and always will, it’s just a shame these things have to happen in the first place, to those who wrote the posts I ask only this. Do you think these are the sort of things others want to read? Do you think it does the TFF any good if someone new finds our forum and reads these sorts of things? Just what sort of impression do you think they will leave with? Do you think they will come back and visit our forum again?
We have some on here who need their heads banging together and they need to remember how they have in the past described the TFF and not forget it can be harmed as well as enhanced by what they write on it. Capitalgull often posted on here how Merse and I needed our heads banging together and we did.
We now know and understand each other so much better and have learned to get along for the good of the TFF, all we need now is for a few others to follow suit.
This weeks winner writes far too long posts at times but hey he does his best to play his part on the TFF as a member on here.
The winner is Dave
One post I made this week
It can be seen here complete with the pictures on the thread
www.torquayfansforum.com/index.cgi?board=fansphoto&action=display&thread=5867
Well it just had to be done and if only because here on the TFF we have a wonderful member who fully supports the TFF and has been such a good friend to it.
Today Carol and I spend five hours at Budleigh Salteron, that’s what it is known as these days but originally the town was named Salterne, as salt was once a thriving industry operated by the monks at the nearby priory in Otterton.
Before I go into a detailed report on our day in Budleigh Salterton, I will get my two moans out of the way first before I bring you all the best bits. First moan is to East Devon District Council, a pound for the first one hours parking in the beach car park is just fine, but a pound for every single hour after that? Have you not heard of sliding price charges so the longer you park the cheaper it gets? Anyway I fed the meter with £5 and just thought for a place that is not really a tourist trap as such it should not be charging so much for parking.
Second moan is why does Budiegh not have a decent café? It sure could do with one and I’m sure it would be very popular and do a roaring trade.
Right I feel so much better now and ready to continue, it’s been along time since I last drove down the main street of Budliegh Salerton and on the road that passes the beach as it climbs up to the top of a cliff before swinging around the left leaving any views of the beach behind. So I was rather surprised just how big the beach really is and it extends in total for 2.5 miles, from Littleham Cove to the west, to Otterhead in the east, where the River Otter meets the sea
We would have walked the whole length of the beach but did not in the end for a very good reason I will come back to that later. After parking the car in the beach car park we set off turning left and heading for the Otterhead end of the beach, this is where the beach really ends as the River otter flows into the sea, there is a great red cliff at this end of the beach and when we returned back to this point nearly five hours later, the tide had gone out and as the river level was low, some people had crossed over to the other side.
As you walk on the very high bank of the pebbles that form the beach you can see on your left the salt flats. Large salt pans were situated at the lower section of the river Otter, the pebble spit, now blocking what was once an open estuary, was a result of the great storm of 1824. The long pebbly beach now forms a natural promenade. You will see in the very first picture the waterways are all full of water and when we returned later it was all just mud and I asked Carol if I should try and walk across it, but after our time on the river Teign, I thought better of it due to the look she gave me.
When you are at the end of the beach you really notice how the beach curves around in a very large crescent shape and from the sea level you notice just how banked up the beach is and one shot I took much later on full zoom, exaggerates it rather a lot as it was taken from the sea level and show Carol sitting on a bench on the pebble spit.
Time to turn around and start walking the rest of the beach and we soon learned the beach really is four beaches in one and changes as you walk along it. The Otterhead end is best described as a tourist beach but when you get to the part of the beach at the bottom of the town, its full of very small boats that I imagine are used by locals to put lobster pots etc.
I also noticed the first of many wooden boxes and at first was unsure what they were, it soon became clear and they all contain winching gear to pull the boats out of the water and up the pebble beach.
The next part of the beach goes back to being more of a tourist beach again and then the last part changes into something completely different again but more of that later. The famous Budleigh Salterton Pebble Beds are composed of hard quartzite identical to 440 million year old rocks found in Brittany. The pebbles were formed and transported in one of the giant rivers that flowed into the Triassic dessert about 240 million years ago.
Over the last few thousand years the pebbles have been falling from the cliffs and today form the built of the beach at Budleigh Salterton. The larger cobbles and pebbles are very hard and unlike any other rock type found in Southern England. As a result they survive as they are transported along the coast by the waves. They can be found from Slapton Sands in Devon to Hastings in Kent.
Bloody amazing really they know the pebbles were transported there 240 million years ago and our useless history man could not even get right the year our club was founded or even when the South Devon League was.
We decided before we walked any further along the beach to go and get something to eat and could not find a decent café, a few tea rooms and an Indian takeaway and so we ended up getting two pasties and two cakes that we took back to the beach to eat.
At the bottom of the town you will learn that Budleigh Salterton was made famous by a painting by Sir John Everett Millais called ‘The Boyhood of Raleigh’ which was painted from the Octagon, in Fore Street, an ancient wall that is featured in the painting’s background. Today this ancient wall bears a blue plaque to commemorate the place captured by the artist
All fuelled up again it was time to walk along the second half of the beach and the part that has magnificent red cliffs that are formed of Red Devonian Sandstone. In places you can see all the pebbles packed and cemented in place, but you only need to touch any part of the cliff face to learn it feels very wet and breaks away with the slightest of touches. You should never remove any pebbles from the cliff face and a bylaw was once passed to try and stop people taking pebbles home with them from the beach itself, but there are no signs up informing you it’s against the law to do so.
I would expect most of the erosion the cliffs have suffered have been caused more by the weather than the sea itself as even the worst high tides could not reach to top of the cliffs, still it has made some very interesting shapes and patterns on the cliff face.
We walked under the cliffs for quite a long way and while we noticed the sign we took no real notice of it as we have seen such signs before and never encountered anyone walking around with no clothes on.
Carol pulled up to a Holt and said, there are people with nothing on and then said “isn’t that your mate Leigh standing there” “don’t look Carol” I shouted out but it was too late she had already got an eyeful of a very shrivelled up thingy swinging in the afternoon sun.
Time to turn around and head back toward the centre of the beach and head up and take a look at the coast path to Exmouth. On the path that goes up the side of the cliff I found myself thinking about Barton Downs and just how much he would have loved all the memorial benches that are there.
The path turned out rather boring as on both sides its all trees and bushes and you can’t even see the sea, you do come to a field called The Jubilee Field and we walked through that and was back on the narrow path again with no views. I kept saying to Carol we will just go a bit further, hoping to come to something of interest and in the end we came to a place where water was coming out off some sort of inlet and running down to the sea and I decided enough was enough as far as the coast path was concerned.
So we headed back to the beach again and walked all the way back to the Otterhead end and as the tide was now much lower I took a few more pictures. We then walked on the other side of the pebble spit right beside the salt flats and we really noticed just how high the pebble spit is. We soon found we were back at the car park and at least I got my moneys worth, so off we drove heading for home, another great and wonderful time and we are living proof that you really do not need to spend a fortune to have a really great time.
A selection of the hundred or so pictures I took today and they are in the order of the story in my post.