The lure of the sea
To warm you up at the start of the long, miserable slog through to spring, here’s a story from last summer. I started writing it at the end of August, like a traditional back-to-school “What I did on my summer holidays” kind of post. Not exactly the kind I would have dared write when I was at school though!
So, against my better judgement, I got talked into going camping. It’s never been something that appealed to me – when I go on holiday I like little home comforts like beds, toilets, floors, that kind of thing. This summer, though, my cousin Marianne convinced me to go and spend a week in a tent with her and her kids. We were never really that close when we were younger, but Marianne split up with her long-term partner around the same time I moved back up to Scotland, so we bonded over our individual personal problems. One evening she came round to my place for tea[note]Wine.[/note] and sympathy, and ended up convincing me to go camping with her. I agreed partly out of sympathy, as otherwise she and the girls wouldn’t have had a holiday this year and I felt they deserved one; and partly out of guilt as it was Marianne’s daughter Eilidh who I nearly killed in the black ice incident before Christmas. And, I suppose, partly out of relief and gratitude that they still trusted me to drive them anywhere.
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