We woke up around 9.30 on Saturday - which if you know us will have you gasping out loud in surprise. We’re not morning people and usually only get up at around 11 on a weekday (hurrah for working for ourselves), let alone at the weekend. We didn’t really have any plans for Saturday but knew if we fancied leaving the island, we’d have to get back before the causeway shut at 3pm so we might as well get an early (for us) start. Plus, we were staying in the east-facing bedroom so the novelty of sunlight, actual sunlight in a house, helped us wake up earlier than normal too. (The east-facing, back bedroom was the cottage’s twin bedroom but the double room at the front was so poky in comparison, we decided we might as well just squish the twin beds together in there instead.)

We had breakfast in the conservatory and over my cocoa puffed rice and John’s nutty, crunchy flakes of corn, we decided against leaving the island — while it wouldn’t be the end of the world, it would have been annoying to miss the causeway coming back in and we didn’t have anywhere we wanted to go that desperately. Instead we read for a bit then walked into the village. We visited the winery’s “craft shop” (is writing ‘Holy Island’ in silver pen on cheap generic fridge magnets a craft?) and the main mead-selling shop, where John tried some of the produce and deeming its sweet-sweet honey-taste acceptable, vowed to return to buy more when we wouldn’t be carrying it around. We bought a fab granary cob from the village store and went to the Ship Inn again for a drink before heading back out towards the cottage. We didn’t stop there though - went on to buy a dressed crab for me from the fish van in the visitor’s carpark (John was both impressed and disgusted when I ate it for lunch) and since we were practically there, walked down to the tide-exposed beach near the causeway to look in rockpools. It was still so so windy though that it wasn’t a terribly fun experience: wind+sand+eyes=owee.

The wind kept up all afternoon so we stayed in the cottage, reading and napping and fiddling about (well, guitar/harmonica/penny-whistling about). In the evening, we went to the Ship for dinner. It was nice enough (I had sea bass with sliced peppers in a sweet chilli sauce and John had a giant Northumberland sausage in an equally giant Yorkshire pudding, and after that, we had chocolate puddle pudding and sticky toffee pudding respectively) but nothing terribly special - good pub food but pub food all the same. By the time we’d finished, the wind had dropped down a smidgen so we walked to the harbour near the castle and walked around on the rocks for a bit before heading back to the cottage for, surprise surprise, more reading. We also played with the “marble maze” thing in the cottage’s small board games collection because we’re just big kids at heart :)

Pictures (click for bigger ones)

• Top: me on the road to nowhere - or at least where the causeway was before the tide came in. This photo was actually taken on the Friday trip down there but whatcha gonna do?
• Lower: John and his ultimate marble maze - and John after the temptation got too much.