Tuesday 30 August 2011

Life under canvas

'oscopies and trains under the sea and 500 mile drives completed, when we arrive at our most favourite summer retreat we spend most of the first week falling asleep at any and every opportunity


But when we have slept enough, we unzip our front door and greet the day


and just a short walk from our canvas home we find this


Actually, when we live under canvas everything is a short walk: toilets, taps, showers, washing up, rinsing vegetables, new elephants for the coolbox...

But if that wasn't enough exercise, there is an awful lot of this to run about on and chase whippets


and a lot of this to paddle in


and play the role of "embarrassing Mother" by sketching seaweed whilst standing knee deep in icy salty water


and some of us also swim in it,
while others only go as deep as the ankles


some of us probably have more inbuilt layers of insulation than others...

When we've warmed up again after our paddlings and swimmings (note to self: take sheepskin boots and/or mohair socks for the cold toes) we potter about on bicycles and find little lanes that we'd like to live down


or buy icecreams from the nice people in the office



and maybe do a bit of paint flinging and paper sticking



or some of us may stay in our cage crate all day, depressed because we were bitten when having a lovely chasing game on the beach and it is sore and we're not allowed to lick it and we cost our owners quite a few euros in out-of-hours vet's bills...


but never mind, we've discovered a new doggy chew


and at the end of the day




we go back to bed in our canvas sanctuary and sleep for hours and hours, all over again



and only wake up to walk to the loo in the dark, stargaze, and count the flashes on the different lighthouses and buoys.

We miss it.

Monday 29 August 2011

Hitting the ground running

Boy are we back from holiday!
We've driven 1500 miles since we left Brittany 10 days ago. 
About which more later. 
If that makes sense. 
Probably not.

We've hardly been in the house and still haven't put any of the camping stuff away, but that hasn't stopped me having a massive clear out and reorganisation of the kitchen cupboards:


It must have been not having a kitchen for three weeks that has made me appreciate the one I've got at home, and realise what is and what isn't essential or necessary.


I've also just finished making about 20lbs of jam whilst simultaneously trying to catch up with blogs and concurrently breaking my new resolution to stop trying to multitask...
Either way, the laptop is feeling a bit sticky now...


This isn't jam:


Only a sort of holiday memories jam.

Sigh.