Nothing finer

It has been the most wonderful, magnificent, holiday day.

We have done all of the very best holiday things, and we are all so tired now that we can hardly see.

We have walked and swum and cycled and eaten doughnuts and I am longing for my bed.

The day started in the middle of the night, with Roger Poopy’s father barking, which I ignored. I ignored it for ages, until in the end it stopped.

When we woke up we found his collar hanging from the little hook dangling from the cooker. We use it to keep the oven closed, and obviously he had become caught on it in the night and had to do some frantic wriggling to escape, accompanied by shouting in vain for help from the indifferent sleepers in whom he had placed his little doggy faith.

We apologised to him profusely, and I think he forgave us.

After that we drove into the centre of Blackpool to one of the few car parks that doesn’t mind camper vans, and we are still here even as I write.

Obviously the next thing to do was to visit Waterstone’s, so Mark and Oliver dragged the bikes off the back, and we set off.

It is an awfully long time since I have cycled anywhere. We cycled a lot today, and I am currently aware of some discomfort in my nether regions in consequence. Mark has been fixing up the bikes in readiness for this very moment. They are bikes that he has unearthed from skips at various delighted moments, and which have been tied to the back of the camper van since the last time we went to Blackpool, which you might recall was some time ago.

All the bikes worked splendidly, especially mine, because Mark very kindly fixed it first, and not quite so much his, which was done when he was running out of time at the end and the gears did not work very well.

It did not really matter, and we tootled along at great speed, marvelling at the wonderfulness of the sun sparkling on the sea beside us, and the wind in our hair. Oliver waved his arms in the air and pretended to catch seagulls, and Mark waved his arms in the air, and I clung on and tried hard not to hit anybody. Truly life has nothing finer to offer.

We stopped halfway along, at the pier, where we ate some restorative doughnuts to fortify ourselves for the rest of the way. Then of course you cannot just ride past the end of the pier, so we ambled along it, past the Big Wheel and the Dodgems, and gazed cautiously at the sea through the cracks beneath our feet, with a thrill of imagining ourselves plunging to an icy death should some pier-collapsing misfortune befall us, which I am pleased to tell you that it didn’t.

We bought some souvenirs made of glittery shells, which will be lovely but will need dusting regularly, and dressed up as cowboys to have our picture taken at the Old Tyme Photographic Studio. Then we got some pretend tattoos and some stick-on plastic jewellery before returning to our bikes.

I could have sighed with the happiness of it all. I will never make it to the middle classes.

We sailed contentedly down the rest of the promenade and then spent a very pleasing hour in Waterstone’s, pondering the merits of romantic fiction versus self help and smart thinking. For the record, Mark bought a book about growing things for bees, Oliver bought something from the New York Times bestseller list, Lucy bought a love story, and I bought Jonathan Sumption’s latest book, because it is lovely to read things with which you already agree.

Of course we have got perfectly good Kindle pads for books, and we use them a lot, but when you are on holiday you need a real book in your hands. This is partly because even though a real book does not survive the incursions of sand and seawater very well, it does rather better than a Kindle, and in any case, Waterstone’s is an important holiday thing. It is the way to know that you are truly relaxed.

We cycled back and shed the now rather heavy load. Then we collected the impatient dogs and rushed straight back to the beach, where we scrambled into our swimming costumes and plunged into the sea.

The dogs did not plunge into the sea. They stood at the edge and barked. Roger Poopy tried several times to join us but was discouraged by the splashy inevitability of waves that somehow just been in the wrong place for him to jump over.

We bobbed about joyfully, trying not to think about jellyfish, and Mark kept his hat on, which he said helped when the waves crashed over his head. Then we had a sandy kerfuffle of trying to dress decently in a high wind before heading back to the camper van for fish and chips.

I can promise you that there is no finer way to spend a day. We are sunburned and salty, sitting here together with new books and exhausted dogs at our feet.

Life is very good indeed.