So it was a year last weekend since I left work at the University of Leeds and things are going well. Not rolling-around-in-piles-of-money-and-giggling well (at least not all the time – but we’ve had our moments) but steady well (aka ‘enough for me to be able to afford the trip to Lindisfarne’ well).

John’s joined me in the crazy world of self-employment and he seems to be enjoying it too – he’s got a steady stream of consultancy work as well as doing development for our future projects. In fact, the former is delaying the latter at the moment but no biggee.

Highlights of the year:

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We had to leave the cottage around 10am so got up around 9am to finish packing and have breakfast in good time. We packed everything into the car then took it down to the visitors carpark (in case the cottage’s cleaner, who was due to arrive imminently, needed to use the driveway). Then as we walked back into the village, we remembered we’d left our bag of fridge stuff in the fridge so grabbed that and left it secluded in the shaded front garden to pick up after we’d dropped off the key in the village.

We went to the winery to buy the mead and a last stroll about the place (which was swarming with day visitors and school children because the causeway was open practically all day), then picked up the fridge stuff on the way back to the car. We stopped halfway down the causeway for a quick run on the dunes then started on our way home.

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Another 9.30am get up on Sunday – with the same streaming sunlight but instead of getting up early to get off the island, I got up early to do some work (boo). John read in the conservatory and photographed frogs in the garden’s pond while I worked and the plan was that I’d finish at lunchtime so we could go into the village to get something to eat at a cafe or the Crown & Anchor pub. But when the time came, we weren’t hungry so we checked what time the cafes closed (5pm-ish) then retreated away from the crowds over the sand dunes near the start of the causeway to the North Shore to build up an appetite.

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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.)

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We’ve just got back from a long(ish) weekend in a cottage on Lindisfarne, just off the coast of Northumberland.

We drove up on Friday and planned to get to the island just before the causeway shut at 2.15pm. I somehow managed to get the maths wrong so we ended up leaving for the three hour drive at 9am-ish. We fought with the GPS most of the way – it didn’t seem to have the island in its village/town/city listing and when we tried to browse it like a normal map, the whole of the north-east was underwater for some reason – but we didn’t really need it: the directions were pretty much “get to the A1. Drive on that for a while. Then turn right. Drive for a little bit. Turn left into the cottage.”

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