Thursday 3rd April 2025, 5.05pm (day 4,970)
Now that’s a change of scene: from thatched cottages to a desert island. It’s nearly a year since my research funding award and, consequently, my chance to visit Ascension Island, were confirmed, and 73 days since I uploaded the map of this place to the blog. Zoom into that image and look at the westernmost headland of the island, where you can just about see the label ‘Tanks’: those are what you see in the distance.
St Helena doesn’t have beaches, and the tourist industry of that island may well lament this fact. But Dead Man’s Beach is a stupendous swathe of sand, and right by the main settlement, Georgetown. What a marvellously evocative name it has (though it will be explained not by the shipwreck of some 17th century pirate vessel, but because Georgetown’s cemetery lies right behind it). This is not even to mention the turtles, evidence for whom lies everywhere: but they will, hopefully, be pictured on one of the remaining eight evenings that I am scheduled to spend in the middle of the Atlantic.
