I dreamed that we were castaways
Two turtles on a log
We were drifting off the coast of France
And listing sideways.
At times like these
You turn in on yourself.

The superstitious sailors of old
Refused to learn to swim
But there’s no need to drown today
Cause we’ve got lifeboats.
Where are the lifeboats?
There are no lifeboats.
There are no fucking lifeboats….

There’s a freak storm blowing in, in from the Arctic
There’s a freak storm blowing in, in from the Poles
I’ll be the last to leave the bridge
The last rat off your ship, England!

In dreams the skies are azure blue
The sea a mirror pond
Then you wake to howling wind and rain
Upon your roof tiles
It won’t be long
It won’t be very long
It won’t be very long now.

© T.Dolby (May 27th 2008)

There’s a woman in my village whose father ran the Three Mariners Inn, Slaughden, pictured here. As the North Sea gradually encroached and reclaimed the village, the pub was the last building left standing. At the end, she told me, she remembers the locals would sit with their tankards on high bar stools, watching as the occasional wave broke in through the front door and wash out the back.

Slaughden Village is gone now, and the only building remaining is the yacht club, which was rebuilt on stilts. Further up the coast is a place called Dunwich, which was once a busy market town with 17 churches. Now all that’s left are three sheds, one of which is a museum documenting Dunwich’s gradual disappearance.

A couple of millenia ago you could walk all the way from East Anglia to Holland, on mainland Europe. But that was at the tail end of the Ice Age, when much of the Northern Hemisphere’s water was still sucked up in glaciers.

It’s blowing a Force 8 gale outside, horizontal rain and bleak dark clouds whizzing by. Huge waves crashing on the beach. This is England in the Spring.

I was flattered to read that eccentric French film director Michel Gondry is making a compilation DVD of his work and wants to include my video for ‘Close But No Cigar.’ I’ve liked a couple of his movies but most of all I adore some of his work with my heroine, Bjork. The finest of the seven clips he did with her has to be ‘Isobel’, below. It’s a kick to read the comments about it on YouTube. People just don’t get her, do they? That’s because she’s from a different species altogether.

That Phoenix space probe that’s digging today under the surface of Mars with a robot arm drill, it might just send us back pictures of Bjork’s frozen face beneath the ice, lying there in her swan dress.



My favourite theme park on the planet is Diggerland in Devon, UK. You can see their real-time webcam here although if it’s night time in England all you’ll see is car headlights going past on the main road.

Anyone that knows me knows I have a fetish for bulldozers. Don’t ask me what it is about them, I just see a bulldozer and I come over all funny. Big yellow ones are quite sexy, but it’s the smallish black and white ones with metal grilles over the driver that really get me going. Imagine my delight when I came across a theme park where you get to drive them yourself! At Diggerland you can race the small ones round a track, dig holes and fill them in again in a medium-sized one, or even go for a whirry ride in the spade part of a giant one. Ooh, I was in heaven!

And now it appears that Diggerland is hiring! I am awfully tempted to sell everything and head down to Cullompton for a spell. I quote: “You will need to like working with the general public, be energetic, have an outgoing personality and enjoy the thrill of showing others how to use the diggers and other activities in Diggerland.” Isn’t that me down to a tee?