Monday 7th November

I have just returned from a weekend with friends who live by the coast, near Bournemouth.  Not quite the exotic luxury of Sandbanks, but a nice house and only a few streets from the sea.  And I am reminded how much I love being beside the sea, especially out of season, when the wind whips up the sand into little swirling eddies around your feet, the rain is gently plashing your face and the surf is crashing in rather than that gentle lapping of summer.  The Mediterranean seashore I remember as always sunny and the sea as blue as blue can be, though this may simply be the cumulative memory of many summer holidays later, set against the rainy grey of London.  Growing up in Putney, we would often holiday in Whitby, with its’ wide and flat windy bay open to the elements, the ruins of the Abbey and the narrow winding streets leading up from the beach to our Hotel.  Here the sea seemed vast and moody and not inviting at all, but as a child I used to go paddling here and can recall building sand-castles and canal systems down by the sea in the soft and wet sand.   We stopped going when I must have been about fourteen, and I spent several years without a holiday or sight of the sea at all, until after Grandma’s illness when she and my mother spent a month there, and I joined them after my Paris adventure for two weeks.

Until I met Edward I hardly went anywhere either, it always seemed too much bother, and besides I had my mother to contend with; we hardly communicated at all really, and the thought of spending two weeks by the sea-side with only my mother for company, morning noon and night, was too daunting to contemplate.  But with Edward, though we spent most of our summer breaks in Tuscany, we were never that far from the coast and would often end up in some small fishing village, taking late lunches in the beautiful Italian sunshine and enjoying their totally unhurried lifestyle, gazing out across the sand and sea, a carafe of vino-rosso, a bowl of olives and the sun slowly going down on the horizon, the perfect end to the day.

Now, although I have been invited to join friends in Italy, I politely decline; I mean what couple wants a middle-aged woman for company, but I do miss the sea I must admit.  I could easily afford to buy somewhere by the coast, and the outskirts of Bournemouth or Brighton near my father would be perfect. But then I still have the responsibility of my mother, and though she is in good health at the moment, she is at that dangerous mid-eighties age when illness can suddenly creep up on one.  So, I think I will wait a while longer before moving from London, and I must admit that I have lived almost my whole life here, for good or bad, and though I am attracted by the sea-side, and London is changing before my very eyes, I am quite nervous of the thought of moving.  So, while I do love to be beside the sea-side, I don’t need to be there all the time.