REVELATIONS AND REVELRY

I am on holiday. Only for about four minutes, but it’s still a holiday. This tiny getaway was designed to satiate the longings of a madman who wanted to surf in North Devon for the weekend. That’s right, surfing. In Devon. In March. I don’t even want to think about the temperature of the sea, it’s truly for the die-hards and I am definitely not one of those.

We are in a gorgeous little holiday apartment right on the beach which means that we don’t have to mess around carting surfboards back and forth on the car, we can wreck our forearms by carrying them to the water. It’s out of season, there’s loads of parking right next to the apartment and it’s literally seconds from the sea. Perfect! Except things haven’t gone exactly smoothly since we arrived.

The first thing we did wrong was to not actually arrive. I thought I was fairly safe by following directions to this specific, tailored-for-surfing beach but we left the main roads for these tiny, little lanes and after twenty minutes the sea was nowhere in sight. But that wasn’t too much trouble – nothing was in sight. Because of the fog. And there was not another car on the road, unless you count the one with the faulty headlight following very closely behind us (Wolf Creek, need I say more). Then we saw a sign for some military thing ahead but we persevered down the lane anyway and quickly came to a gate. I did a 93 point turn and suggested that while we were here we should probably let the dogs out for a quick wee, seeing as they’d been in the car for about three hours.

“Come on,” I say to my eldest daughter, “let’s just walk them quickly.”

“Mummy! No! Didn’t you see the signs?!”

“Yes…..but so what?”

“It said there were troops training, it had a little picture of shotguns and unexploded bombs! I am not getting out here!”

Oh. OK, maybe it’s best if we don’t go for a wander here, alone, in the dark then.

When we arrived at our destination, it was pitch black and all we had were vague instructions which alluded to a reception hut, a key safe and the details of our apartment. ‘Next to the restaurant’ it said. All that was next to the restaurant was their bin area, which seemed improbable for hosting a reception, we did actually check, albeit doubtfully and trying not to breathe. ‘Next to the restaurant’ happened to be about half a mile away along cold, windy, sandy footpaths with no lights, it turns out. But we found it eventually and began the gargantuan task of locating the actual apartment. The place was literally deserted, with no signs whatsoever. There’s a row of apartments called ‘The Burrows’ and our burrow was allegedly number 5. The problem was that there were no actual numbers, or indeed any indication, to clarify which one was which. Some had lights on and some were in the dark, so we hedged our bets and stole up to one of the dark ones. This is worse than it sounds because in order to do this we had to open their private garden gate and trespass across their land, sneaking up to the front door to see if we could spy a number. I hoped fervently that there was no farmer with a shotgun, ready to take us out if we started worrying the residents.

For the first couple, nope, there was nothing. We were reduced to burglar status, trying each door until we found one that our key fitted, which it eventually did. In a bid to recover from our journey I, quite reasonably and immediately sought sustenance in the form of wine, but the only glasses that are here are the smallest, meanest little wine glasses that I’ve ever seen. It’s like drinking from a thimble. But desperate times, desperate measures and all that.

This morning it was snowing. Undeterred, my crazy family donned their wetsuits, waxed their boards and headed off determinedly to submerge themselves into the sea under the blanket of the howling winds and blizzard. I honestly feared for their poor little hearts, being goaded into sudden arrest by the sub-zero temperature of the water. I, myself, stayed in bed with tea and a book. As anyone who knows me will testify, I’m more likely to fly through the air than I am to get into the English seas in March. And it seems that I was right, about ten minutes later the intrepid explorers were back, blue of lips and chattering of teeth. “Nice time?” I called out.

“Can’t. Feel. My. Hands.” But their hearts were still beating so we must be thankful for small mercies.

And then this afternoon, it was my turn to venture out to the sand dunes with my newly-arrived-back-from-work partner. We’re still at the stage where spending a second apart seems completely unreasonable. We were hoping for a nice walk. We didn’t mind the chilly weather (although we were freezing), we didn’t mind the biting wind that attacked us as we walked along the top of the dunes. Well, I say we didn’t mind – it was enough to drive us elsewhere. So, we made our way further down into the dunes, off piste – off the beaten track, if you will. And we found brambles, vicious brambles, that were growing over every single path we went down and were determined to rip my leggings, and Dubarrys, to shreds. We came across a sign telling us to beware of the sheep, dogs must be kept on leads, that kind of thing, but other than that, we were alone.

Walking in the sand dunes is like entering an alternate universe. Everything looks the same, all the paths are identical, winding up and down around the dunes and all routes lead to the same place. Almost literally. You quickly become disorientated, lose track of which direction you’re facing and have no idea where the beach is and much less your apartment. It was freezing cold, the sea winds whipped around us and chilled our very bones. After about fifteen minutes, I looked around me and realised two things:

a)       We were lost

b)      There was a bull bellowing at us and preparing to charge

Yep. I kid you not. As we clambered up onto a dune which dipped sharply downwards, we were suddenly confronted by at least four cows and a bull. Sheep! Where were the sheep??? We signed up for sheep! We both froze, unwillingly to attract any attention to ourselves, but as luck would have it, we had the dogs to do that for us. Off they bombed towards the bovines, happily anticipating a nice chase. I don’t think for one second that they appreciated they might be the chasees. We glanced at each other, “They can run faster than we can,” we reasoned, and we climbed swiftly up onto the next dune. In our hurry to get away, I fell once, sustaining bramble injuries to my frozen hands and knees, but we had to scrabble hastily onwards in order to escape the bull. It didn’t work. Every time we peered over a peak, that bloody bull was there, surrounded by an increasing number of acolyte cows. Watching us with his black, beady eyes, bellowing and planning his next mode of attack.

“Get down!” was hissed at me. “Get down here, quickly!”

It soon became clear that he was pursuing us. I have no idea what for, or how long we traversed the dunes, shivering, frantically searching for the path that led to home. I didn’t care how cold I was. It may not be my idea of fun, but I will say that I’d rather dive into the sub-zero seas than I would be gored by an angry bull.

Happily, we made it back eventually, the dogs had re-joined us just as we emerged from the dunes, wondering if we were in fact walking into 2055. We stumbled down towards the safety of the beach in blinding snow and freezing temperatures and I realised something. I may not be a die-hard, but I was a hair’s breadth away from becoming a die-cold.

This is a brilliant opportunity to write and I’m wasting it. One daughter is away and my husband and the other daughter have gone to watch cricket for the day – “I suppose there’s no chance I can persuade you to come with me?” he said hopefully this morning. “Absolutely not,” was my reply. I couldn’t let there be doubt over the issue. Call me a heathen but I just cannot appreciate this extraordinarily timeless game. I don’t understand it at all, there are too many people on the field to keep up with, the scoring is beyond me (as it is for most girls I suspect) and the slang that goes with cricket is impenetrable. And one game goes on for days. Literally. Yesterday my husband  ‘liked’ a facebook page that basically makes fun of girls asking “Who’s winning?” during a cricket match. Well what is wrong with that???? It’s a completely natural question to ask of a competitive game. Someone will win (even though it’s becoming increasingly un-PC to do so). But I think the point is that you don’t know who will win until the last, tense, nail-biting second of a game that’s had you riveted to the seat for the duration. Did anyone spot the sarcasm there? No, there’s only one good thing about cricket and that’s the players in their whites look surprisingly sexy, and that is not enough to sustain me through a game. Anyway, back to me wasting time.

I’m so bedazzled by being alone for this length of time that I can hardly decide what to do first; I can’t apply myself properly to anything. I dream of time like this. I am almost always thinking oh if only I had a few clear hours alone I could do so much housework/ironing/sorting/tidying/writing, and now that I have it do you know what I have done? I have read yesterdays papers and I have eaten a bowl of pasta. Pasta is the devils work but I just cannot stay away from it. My friends are amazed by my ambivalence towards desserts, I don’t care about them at all, it’s bread and pasta that are my vices. You will be able to tell from this that I am the kind of girl who lives life on the edge. I did try Pimms ice-cream last night though. Only because I’d never seen it on a menu before and I was intrigued. It was OK.

So, Wales. Wales was great. It was my first time in the country and I thoroughly enjoyed every second. I survived the surfing! It’s harder than the blond, dreadlocked, very svelte instructor made it look. We ended up exhausted and bruised by flinging ourselves against the boards, ‘catching’ the waves, falling off and dragging the boards back out to waist-high water where we repeated the process. This went on for two hours and honestly we were absolutely shattered. And freezing. The Gower coast is very beautiful but it is not the warmest of climes to be surfing in. Definitely Calfornia next time. But it was fine because afterwards we had the luxury of the outdoor, lukewarm showers that I detest with a passion. I can’t bear my feet on the floor of those places, I will never remove my flip-flops. Even the thought makes me shudder. But it did warm us up and rinse most of the sand off. The rest of the sand was spread liberally around the flat, our beds and the seats of my friend’s husband’s Jaguar that we were borrowing. This last did not go unnoticed, unfortunately. And apart from surfing, we ate in some very nice restaurants, we visited some very beautiful places, we drank a lot of wine and Malibu (not together) and caramalised ten onions. Badly. We had a wonderful, relaxed, ramshackle few days – there were seven of us staying in a two-bedroom flat – but somehow it worked. I think mostly due to the laidback attitude of our lovely host, Gill, my friend’s mother. She didn’t seem to mind her home being overtaken by someone she barely knew (me) and three girls obsessed by first catching and then grooming her petrified cats, sand being sprinkled everywhere and the smell of ten onions lingering for days. I cannot say that my own mother would have been as relaxed….

And disappointingly my review copies have not arrived. I emailed my publishers to check on progress to be told: sorry, we’ve only just sent the book to the printers, the copies will be another 2-3 weeks. It doesn’t really matter, it just means that my carefully planned and rigidly stuck to promotion campaign gets a little behind. Which in turn means working very hard in September. Not a problem. In some ways this is fortunate, I’d be limited in what I could do, practically-speaking, because I shall be away again this week, at my mother’s house in Berkshire. Myself and the girls will bump the household up to ten, which is bound to cause tension around eating and sleeping arrangements so I can report on that next time. It won’t be like Wales, that’s for sure. But on our return, myself, plus husband and a couple of friends are going to a Burlesque night at a local theatre, which should be interesting, so I have that to look forward to.

And now that I have this written, I can return to the dizzy heights of my solitude! The excitement is wearing off now so I might be able to calm down and do something constructive. It won’t involve Twitter though because despite my efforts I still only have five followers. This does not bode well.

Next time: my mother’s house and stockings, I suppose. Not together I am at pains to add.