A Grand Day Out - Scarborough

Week 2 of the summer holidays - skint, so we're tapping into that "staycation" trend..... but determined to get to the seaside at least twice we caught a train (ok, 3 trains) to Scarborough for the day on a blazing hot gorgeous blue sky day, armed with sun-block, a tiny beach towel for the paddling, memories of a lovely week spent there 4 years ago, and 2 pairs of very hard-working feet!

(Now, reading that sentence back, who would ever guess I get paid to make teenagers use full-stops???)

What To Do On A Monday, Part 107

What I Should Be Doing:

• sorting out the unspent tescos restaurant tokens from last week - how badly did I overestimate the boys' appetite for pizza? we only used them ONCE!!!
• sorting out sending vital financial gubbins to some woman in a dark, windowless office several miles away so that the 13 year old will get a bus pass by the start of term
• ordering school uniform so said 13 year old will have the right clobber, also by the same deadline
• throwing away last year's scraps of paper from school. obvs books and other testimony to the 12 year old's achievements will be archived in a box under the bed...
• mending a collapsed billy bookcase so that the books on the floor can go back onto it
• taking old books and STUFF from their rooms to the charity shop

....umm, so thats pretty much all the boring not-done things that were on my pre-holiday list.....

What I Am Doing:

• slowly realising that the urge to Get A Medium-Sized Dog is the same urge we get every holiday, seeing so many cute dogs at the seaside. It is Not Practical and must be denied....*
• realising that it is Not Big and It Is Not Clever to reveal on here how last week I showed the kids you can eat Tunnocks Tea Cakes by putting stuffing one whole one into your mouth. To avoid dropping choccie bits on the carpet of our rented flat, y'see...
• craving some metal old-school style reading lamps. Now then, white or red? Or both?
• wondering how on earth I let myself get talked into going to see Cars 2 tomorrow - it was meant to be the 12 year old and his mate, having a bit of independence. My friend, aka the mate's mum, wants to come too... perhaps its not too late to persuade her we should just go for a nice long coffee while they get blasted by 3D cartoon nonsense...
• spending ALL morning so far catching up on posts I didn't get time to read last week. It has now been over 2 hours....

Oh well, at least the fidgetty, restless mood I was in yesterday has subsided. I had NO concentration span all day yesterday, and couldn't settle down to do anything. Apart from 2 boring loads of laundry...

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* The To Get A Dog Or Not Get A Dog issue may be decided by your voting yes or no.

I'd sort of like people to say yes.....

So This Is Where We Went...

.... Brighton!!!

 Mostly around the North Laines...

Click on this one and enlarge the picture to see the notice in the window!

Some Snap-Happy Tourist reflected in the window. Not me...

 Tableau of superheroes'n'kitsch in the window display

 

The fantastic roofline of The Pavilion

Very thoughtful recycling opportunities

Back...

..... with some excellent souvenirs. A big plastic giraffe. From a 20p bucket outside a fancy retro boutique.

A bucket-load of postcards, which have been haphazardly slapped up.

And some silly fridge magnets. The photos are terrible - I've just taken these, and you can tell the camera must be a bit tired from the overwork I put it through. Yes, there are more photos...for another time.

Anyhow, we're back from a lovely week away by the sea. A strange week - the horrible events in Norway were happening just before we set off, then Saturday late afternoon we started unpacking, set up the laptop and heard about Amy Winehouse. I think everything nice has been already said about her on other peoples' blogs this week, and as for the nasty stuff, the Daily Mail and the Sun et al, lets just ignore that. And try to get over how unreal it feels that she's gone. Perhaps predictably, but too soon anyway.

Getting There

Well, I'm nearly there... as in nearly packed ready for going on away on Saturday. I can't believe how much time I've wasted this week without making a start on Doing Stuff. My mum does herself a timetable of what she's doing for the week before she goes anywhere; and she irons too - that's two things we do differently already. I've always envied that tale of Anita Pallenberg just jumping on planes with a credit card in her back pocket... you never heard of her trying to take the kitchen sink.

This is what I still have to do:

• Wrap up 4 small packages for ebay
• Photocopy some money stuff to get the 13 year old's school bus pass (though that can wait another week)
• Clean the fishtank
• Get the 13 year old's case packed
• Get the 12 year old a haircut
• Find all sorts of random ointments that we might just need while we're away - mouth ulcer stuff being the kind of thing they expect you to be able to produce at 11pm
• Find our map of the place we're going to (handily found last month in a house clearance shop)
• Pack the Pizza Express and Bella Italia vouchers that I traded in the Tesco points for
• Watch some more daytime antiques programmes - who knew you could sell Russian cutlery for £6,000?

To make it sound better, these are the things I have done so far:

• Peered inside the 12 year old's suitcase that he packed last week and shook out the screwed up hoodies and noticed that he's only packed 2 t-shirts and no underwear.
• Packed my Ideal Holiday Capsule Wardrobe, then took out 4 things and put in another top, but no jewellery yet.
• Left lots of space in my case for Items I Might Just Find In Charity Shops
• Dyed my hair
• Bleached the bathroom tiles and got that shower curtain in the machine - always an essential getting-ready activity, non?
• Realised we have no food for today or tomorrow so went to the supermarket, and got fish'n'chips for tonight.
• Watered the plants. The outdoor ones, that by law of averages will get rained on at some point next week. Haven't watered the indoor ones.

So, I must be all ready to go, right? I am pretending so...

Busy Week

At last some lovely holiday time! Its practically Summer Holidays Part 1, with this gorgeous weather (plus once term starts again its only 48 early school-mornings til the Real Summer Holidays start)

Of course the beautiful hot sunshine has seen me become a laundry bore - averaging 2 loads out on the line each day, with the 2nd lot usually left out overnight to get Proper Baked all morning until the next lot is ready to go out. Yawn.... fascinating, eh.


But don't worry, I'm not fixated enough to do any of this:




The Unnerving Experience of Friday is slowly receding. Nastiness personified in the form of NHS well-meaning... I've been busying myself all weekend - de-junking the loft and have even made myself sort All The Photos That Have Ever Been Loaded Onto The Computer into folders. How organised is that!

We're going to Kent and London later this week; this is something the teenage recluse is ok with doing so I'm leaving the London itinerary up to the kids. Although I'll try to fit in a detour to where they lived as babies, the buzzing gorgeousness of Columbia Road. 2 cameras should ensure some photos get onto the blog. Albeit one with a temperamental battery, and a lost charger for the other one, so I should manage a fuzzy shot of some sheep and an oast-house or two, and someone's feet.