The other day I was inveigled into driving to Pendine. I thought of all those scarved, goggled, speed-crazed fellows like Malcolm Campbell, Henry Seagrave and John Cobb who posed, modestly grinning, on the pages of my copy of Every Boy's Book of Record-Breakers, or whatever it was called. Cobb's record attempts took place, I seem to remember, at Bonneville Salt Flats and weren't his cars the Mobil Railton Specials? This suggests commercial involvement of a type that chaps like Campbell wouldn't have touched with a starting handle. There is a Museum of Speed (which I did not visit) at Pendine. On the famous sands I walked past a cone. There came the immediate and ill-natured blaring of a horn. A hundred yards off a man in the cab of a tractor made prohibitive gestures. A figure appeared on the balcony of a concrete, cube-shaped building among the dunes, where a red flag fluttered. The Ministry of Defence appropriated a large part of the sands during the War and, unsurprisingly, was disinclined to relinquish them in peace. Is it just me, or are there more and more places, previously accessible, from which the public is now excluded?
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