Freshwater

On Saturday, the Guardian had a striking picture on the front page alerting us to the piece at reference 1 in the interior. A picture of a chunk of coastline, a calm sea and a threatening sky. While the piece was all about a serious storm about to hit northern parts of our archipelago, serious enough to be named..

Well, said BH. The storm may well be up north, but that picture is of Freshwater Bay, on the Isle of Wight, very much down south.. As it turned out the storm has been more or less absent from Epsom, just a little rain and less wind, so I dare say it has been more or less absent from the Isle of Wight too.

This afternoon, I get around to checking. Definitely Freshwater Bay, taken from the Military Road (aka A3055) somewhere handy to Compton Down, looking west.

I then go to the Guardian, where the story still exists, but the picture has been moved to Ayrshire, which is up north. I can find no trace of the original picture. There does not seem to be a digital version of the print edition, at least not for my low grade of subscription. I might say in passing that I thought I got such a thing with my high grade of subscription with the FT - but a thing which seems to have morphed into a chargeable extra since I last looked at it.

Next stop Google Image Search and the best he can do is snapped above. Which is not very warm at all, although clearly an image taken from roughly the same place. Regular search in Bing no better.

Odd how the Guardian image has vanished from view. But then, would active erasure be unreasonable: there was a lapse of front page judgement, which they wanted to put right? Maybe also, their image, the one we started with, was faked up, with the bank of clouds added to an originally more sunny image - well within the capability of Photoshop or some such, given the clear space between land and cloud. Or does the Guardian have some published editorial policy which says that they do not do that sort of thing?

PS 1: BH suggested that they probably got lots of mail about it, lots of mail from pensioners like ourselves with nothing better to do. At which point they moved into erasure But there must be copies lurking somewhere.

PS 2: is the dent in the cloud base above Tennyson Down suggestive of faking? Or is it rather a natural effect of bright light behind land, of the sort captured by Holman-Hunt in the sheep picture noticed at reference 2?

References

Reference 1: UK braced for strong winds and rain when Floris blows on Monday - Kevin Rawlinson, Guardian - 2025.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/03/boundaries.html.