Two thousand tons of prime pine is a lot of woodwork by anyone's reckoning, and I was one of the thousands of people determined to grab a slice of visual history at first-hand — forget all this reality TV stuff!

When I was down there on gale-swept Monday, there was almost an awed silence from the wind-battered masses gazing at was surely a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

In fact, nothing like it had happened since that incident in 1901 when the collision-crippled SS Indiana was grounded a mile from the pier.

The Indiana's cargo included oranges and lemons, and, after the crates of fruit broke open, thousands of the fruit spilled out and ended up on the shoreline from Goring to Rottingdean, mixed up with the jetsam of splintered crates.

Last weekend's timber jam on Worthing beach reminded me of that marvellous Ealing Studios comedy Whisky Galore (1949), in which Scottish islanders targeted the 50,000 cases of whisky in a sunken cargo boat.

By Monday morning, safety fencing along Worthing prom prevented enthusiastic "plundering" of wood on a Whisky Galore scale.

But an office colleague, who lives on West Worthing seafront, told me that her husband had seen residents of one upmarket block of flats hurrying planks into their garages late on Sunday evening.

And I heard that a Goring postwoman reportedly told one of her customers she had seen pensioners galore helping themselves to the wood soon after most of the Ice Prince's wooden cargo ended up along Worthing's foreshore.

Amazingly, it was on the exact Saturday of January last year that crates of cargo from the stricken MSC Napoli started to be washed ashore at Branscombe beach in Devon. Hundreds of people made off with valuable hauls, including 50 BMW motorcycles worth £15,000 each.

No such tempting goodies have been available from the sealed-off Worthing beaches, although I doubt if the new parking attendants would have allowed such "salvage" merchants to park long enough to load up their ill-gotten gains!

Unlike oil pollution, this type of beach contamination is comparatively easy to clear and with no nasty, long-term effects — even though the job is likely to take several weeks.

Good news, too, that commercial insurers are footing the clean-up bill.

The last thing we want is an extra penny or two on our council tax rate.

On reflection, there have been previous occasions when beach access has been barred.

There were always times when 7ft mounds of stinking seaweed made the shingle a no-go area, and during the war, barbed wire and mines did the job.

Comparing this week's knotty problem with what faced Hitler, I'd say those thousands of planks would have provided a much stiffer obstacle to Hitler's storm troops.