B is for the Beach

A couple of Bs for you today ....

First a song - Baby Mine from my second album Dreaming many moons ago.

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I am very fortunate to live beside the sea - we open the gate at the bottom of our garden and we're on the beach.   It's not a very pretty beach ... stony and all the rubbish from the mussel boats gets swept up onto it ... but it's ours and I love it.  It was a childhood dream of mine to live by the water and here we are.

We're on the shores of Carlingford Lough which opens out onto the Irish Sea .... Carlingford Lough incidentally is one of only a couple of fjords in Ireland - (a fjord is an inlet where the mountains run down to the sea) and in our case songs have been written about it for centuries.

The Irish Sea from the top of CloughMor behind our house looking across the water to the Cooley Mountains.

B is also for Border - At night time we see the lights of Carlingford across the water.  Carlingford is in the south of Ireland and we're in Northern Ireland .... Can you see the border running up the middle of the water there!!  The border has been a part of our lives constantly here - no customs now and no checkpoints any more, but if we have to send a letter to those lights over there, we have to send it airmail!!!  go figure!!

During the bad storms earlier over Christmas the tide came right up to the gate ... never seen that before .

But low tide is equally spectacular 

Are you near water?   Does the water inspire you?  Were you affected badly by the weather this Christmas?   And what about borders?   

This is day to of the A to Z Blogging Challenge - read loads of interesting blogs yesterday ...