Vegan Birthday BBQ on the beach

Last weekend we visited my family in the Gower in South Wales.  We had some beautiful weather for my sisters birthday on the beach.  She is vegan too so the BBQ was 100% vegan and delicious.  

I am lucky enough to have two sisters, my other sister made this fab birthday bunting which was hung on some rocks. 

She's single folks!

Some blankets spread out by the rocks set out our little area.

Me with my other sister.

What's a summer BBQ without Pimms?

Linda Mccartney Sausages, and burgers (made by mashing up some LM sausages with some chilli and other seasonings and re-forming them into burgers) and some veggie kebabs which are transformed on a BBQ with a lovely chargrilled flavour. 

We also cooked some sweetcorn over the coals, still in it's husk. Delicious. 

My sister also made some moreish red cabbage relish,

Me and my lovely mum,

Ending a beautiful day on the gorgeous shoes of Rhossili Beach. 

Still trying to save the world

Last weekend I went to stay with my mum and dad is South Wales for a few days to get a bit of a break and a rest with my boys.
We visited one of my favourite beaches in South Wales; Port Eynon.  It's a beautiful beach in the Gower made more interesting by the fact that a lot of the sand is washing away (no one really knows why) which is revealing the stumps of trees and other flora that has been preserved on the sea floor for thousands of years!  Amazing!
But also quite sad because the beach is totally different to how it looked as I was growing up.  It used to be a very sandy beach but is now very stony and muddy.  Another major feature that this beach has adopted since I was a child is masses and masses of little pieces of plastic, all different colours, shapes and sized, all different types of plastic, stringy, spongy, hard, soft and all of it floats.  I never remember there being so much plastic on the beach when I was a child and it breaks my heart that in just 25 years or so the coast of the UK has been littered with these little pieces of plastic which cause so much damage to sea life.  These pieces of plastic will be on these beaches FOREVER.  They will eventually degrade into smaller and smaller pieces so we won't be able to see them but the will choke micro organisms which try to eat them.  I feel so ashamed for what humankind has done to this beautiful planet.

Some of the flotsam can my quite visually attractive.  

Boris found a starfish or "Star crab" as he prefers to call them, which he duly rescued and placed gently into a tock pool.

 Here you can see the remains of preserved flora which is thousands of years old amazing to think we are seeing this again since such a long time.  Also equally amazing to think that this land used to be forest! 

 Picking his way through the pieces of plastic.

In this small section of sand I found over 13 pieces of plastic.

Every time I visit the beach I make a point of collecting 3 pieces of littler and putting them in the bin.  It's not much but if all of us picked up 3 pieces of plastic every time we visited the beach we might make at least a small dent in the massive problem.  Find out some more information here: http://www.take3.org.au/main/page_blog.html