Once again, I am on the taxi rank, and the holiday is over.
I am very sorry about this, holidays are nice things, and this one has been lovely.
We woke up this morning to clear blue skies and bright sunshine, so inviting that once we had finished drinking coffee we jumped out of bed and went off for a long ramble along the shore with the dogs.
This was splendid. We listened to the sea gulls and smelled the tide coming in, and breathed in the autumn smell of damp leaves and berries.
The path ran along the side of some woodland, which was a glorious tangle of brambles and haws and convovulus and crab apple. On the seashore little mallows still blossomed in tufts, and sandpipers poked about in the muddy hollows in the marsh grass.
It was beautiful. We looked at the little islands and worked out where the causeway would once have been. We cut across the back of the old Priory, now a centre for people with bald heads and orange dresses, but still beautiful and probably far more tranquil than it was when once it was the hub for collecting sea-taxes and for farming and for all of the local trade. The monks here were once very wealthy indeed, until Henry VIII dispatched them off through the eye of a needle to get proper jobs and pinched all of their worldly goods.
The dogs charged about barking at things and making the acquaintance of lots of other dogs, all bounding splashily in and out of streams and rock pools and mud. We were so warm in the sunshine we peeled our jerseys off and wandered along in T-shirts, soaking up the last of the year’s Vitamin D.
Eventually we realised that we were starving, and made our way back, where we replaced any calories we might have burned off with huge dishes of fruit muesli laced with cream and yoghurt.
We sat outside on a bench overlooking the sea to drink our coffee, and the tide rushed in to cover all foot-and-paw-prints. Roger Poopy became very attached to a solid-looking bulldog, who sloshed a string of dribble about behind him every time he shook his head. We had to separate them when it became clear that the bulldog was beginning to become irritated by Roger’s attempts to father puppies on him.
In the end we decided that the time had come to move on, and we packed ourselves up reluctantly. We warned the dogs of terrible consequences if anybody put even a single muddy paw on our bed, and set off.
We chugged along the coast to Barrow and refilled the van with useful things like gas and diesel and air in the tyres.
Then we drove over to Walney Island, because Mark wanted to look at the scenery there before we went home.
He told me stories about when he had been taken there in his appallingly impoverished farming childhood, about the days when they moved sheep around the islands and got stuck in the salt marshes. Walney Island is a bleakly desolate place, I would not have liked to be outside chasing sheep around in lashing rain and howling gales.
As it was the sun was shining and we were safely in the camper van, not dressed in leaky wellingtons and trying to rescue recalcitrant sheep from hideous quicksandy deaths, so it was all right, but I shuddered to think about it. I am very glad that the nineteen seventies are over, it isn’t even as if the worst thing about them was the hairstyles. It is wonderful to be grown up in a lovely modern world with iPhones and Mediterranean cooking and decent painkillers and dustbin men who are not on strike.
When Mark was a child they had not even invented electricity in the part of Cumbria where he lived, never mind telephones and gas boilers. This has made him very committed to the idea of a warm house with instant light and a microwave. He is not the sort of person who ever fancies the simple life. Complicated, preferably with plenty of wiring, is good.
In the end of course we had to go home, because of work. I did not at all want to, I could have cheerfully spent days and days wandering around in the camper van, looking at sheep and seagulls, but of course we have an extravagant lifestyle to support, and so off we went.
It has been a brilliant day.
We are going to have another one next week.
