Tag: sea

thing 37: ‘a delightful weekend in the country’: going on holiday (not by mistake), part (iii)

As you’ll have gathered by now, wtak is not a ‘quick, pass me a dolphin so I can swim with it’, bucket list sort of a thing. Not wanting to panic my way through middle age ticking things off and anxiously scuttling onwards, I didn’t Make A List. I have known, though, of a few things I wanted to feature in my fifty, and seeing puffins was one of them. No idea why. It just was. And today, all being well, was the day.

Suan and I drove to Seahouses and parked near the harbour, whence (more…)

thing 37: ‘a delightful weekend in the country’: going on holiday (not by mistake), part (i)

Okay, so it’s not exactly the country. And it’s not a weekend, more of a week. Well, 5½ days. But there hasn’t been nearly enough Uncle Monty here at wtak; and besides, I was definitely starting to drift into the arena of the unwell—too much work, too many difficult things going on. So it was time to stop. Or go, then stop. So off I went.

For me, holidaying alone—I love the slightly quaint feel of “holiday” as a verb—can be a tricky undertaking, both in the conceiving and in the doing thereof. I can well see that a few days away, alone, might (more…)

thing 27: ‘and thus the whirligig… brings in his own revenges’: a water park

… Only this was the whirligig of space, not time. And boy, he must have been holding a serious grudge against me. His revenges were a surprise. And they went on a really long time.

I was bidden to Blackpool, accompanying Eleanor (goddaughter) and her friend, plus Jane and James—the abseil crew, minus Izzy—on a birthday trip to the water park. I’d been to one with Lem and Susie on the Ancient Mariner trip to Corfu, and again more recently, and had loved it both times. Water, sunshine, what film censors would probably call “mild peril”, and (more…)

thing 23: ‘where the soul can think aloud’: a walk on the beach

Nobody brings anything small into a bar round here.

One of the lines which convinced me about Tom Waits; and I remain convinced, despite the discovery that the line was lifted more or less verbatim from Harvey. In the film, Elwood P Dowd also claims ‘I’ve wrestled with reality for 35 years… and I’m happy to state I finally won out over it’. I went to the beach, this day, feeling that reality had definitely won out over me—more TS Eliot and a reality overdose than Jimmy Stewart and an escape from it. But maybe people rarely bring anything small to the sea, either. (more…)