A British Seaside Holiday in Miniature: An Afternoon at Hayling Island.

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‘I think I’d like a week in Lyme Regis,’ My mum says.

We’re sitting in her kitchen, in August, playing our favourite game – Post Pandemic Fantasy Holidays. Dad has opted for a return to Vienna and I quite fancy Stockholm, but Mum, who has just finished re-reading Persuasion for the third time, decides on Dorset. Having just finished reading Penelope Lively’s A Stitch in Time, which is also set in Lyme Regis, I can see where she’s coming from. Both of us are dreaming of the classic British seaside holiday – a week of days on the beach, hours spent paddling in freezing, grey-green water, sandwiches with extra sand, shell-collecting and sunburned noses. Since a week in Dorset is off the cards due to Covid, we decide on the next best thing and head to Hayling Island for the afternoon.

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Tiny Museums I : Boyes Museum, Bridlington.

If you live anywhere in the north-east of England, or, even if you’ve just been passing through, you’ve probably at least heard of the discount department store chain Boyes. To date, there are sixty-seven branches of the shop up and down the country, with the original store having opened in Scarborough in 1881 and the latest store having being set up in Barton-upon-Humber in September, 2019.

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January in Pictures.

I know everyone, everywhere has said it, but January has been a very long month. Although it hasn’t been cold here in York, it’s been unendingly dark and grey - a month of waking up in darkness, of making stew and baked potatoes (and worrying that it’s not really cold enough for stew) of curling up on the sofa under a blanket with a book and of being at home mostly, and trying to be slow and mindful.

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Saying Goodbye to my Childhood Swimming Pool.

I don’t remember my first swimming lesson, but it has attained almost monumental status in our family folklore. According to legend, whilst the other three year-olds in my class got into the water with no fuss , I refused to follow them and remained on the side of the learner pool, the picture of anguish and fear in Pink Panther armbands. In the end, my mum was obliged to borrow a swimming costume from another mother and accompany me into the water for the rest of the lesson (sorry, Mum!) From this ignoble beginning however, I must have decided I quite liked swimming, because going to the pool became a twice-weekly fixture in my life for the next twenty years.

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Bodies of Light: A Morning Swim at Sant' Alvise.

Whenever my mother goes away, she always tries to find a local pool to swim in. Even if there’s a pool at the hotel, perhaps especially if there’s a pool at the hotel, she’ll always try and find a nearby place to have a swim. My dad finds the spirit of new places by taking photographs and I go grocery shopping, but my mother finds her way into a new location by doing a mile in the local swimming pool. As a family, we’ve swum in Greek water parks, Italian lidos, French lakes and, memorably, in 1997, found out about the death of Princess Diana whilst swimming in a gorgeous Danish municipal pool. When she visits Venice, once or twice a year, my mother always makes sure she fits in a swim at her favourite spots and, on our last trip, I went with her to the pool at Sant’ Alvise, in the Canareggio district.

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Marking Time: A Month of Tiny Paintings

One of my favourite kinds of YouTube videos is the nighttime routine. There’s something oddly soothing about watching people wash their faces, pack their bags for the next day and do yoga. Those videos always make me want to reassess my own evening routine and make some changes (that no-screens before bed thing is still a work in progress). 

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Neutralising Stendhal Syndrome? : Thoughts on taking Pictures in Venice.

n his book ‘Venice is a Fish,’ Tiziano Scarpa writes at length on the potentially lethal effects of being continually surrounded by the beauty of this city: 

‘In the historic centre, the aesthetic radioactivity is extremely high. Every angle radiates beauty….you are face-butted, slapped, abused by beauty, Andrea Palladio topples you over…Mauro Codussi and Jacopo Sansovino finish you off. You feel terrible. It’s the famous illness of Monsieur Henri Beyle, a disorder known to history as Stendhal syndrome.’ 

‘the tourists are lucky: the moment they find themselves confronted by a splendid piece of architecture, the neutralize the aesthetic radioactivity by boxing it away in a camera.’ 

[Tiziano Scarpa, Venice is a Fish: A Cultural Guide, Serpent’s Tail, 2010]

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