We took a trip to Southport today for a day out and to see my mum’n'dad - and we got a lovely day for it for a change - sunny, crisp and clear.

We bought some books (including a cool photo one on human dissection), wandered around the town for a bit and ate some fresh donuts before strolling off down the pier in time for sunset - well, coincidentally being on the pier at sunset anyway. For once the sea looked to have been in to almost the sea wall in recent times so the dying sunlight reflected quite beautifully off the sand and I took some photos. I used the “Sundown” setting on my camera sometimes (the redder pictures) and the standard setting the rest of the time (the ones with the blue sky). I’m quite impressed by how my little camera managed it - as usual, all I’ve done to the photos is scale them - haven’t changed any colour levels or anything.

After all that perambulation of the pier, we went to the Guesthouse pub for John to try a Southport Brewery beer but they didn’t have any on so he had to have something from Blackburn or somewhere instead (he said it was still good). After that, we went home so Mum could make us some home-made chips (actually from potatoes and fried! such a novelty these days!) and we all watched some godawful thing that passed for Saturday night prime time TV.

Then John and I had a heated discussion about the welfare state, the role of government and the two-party political system in the car on the way home.

It was a good day.

(Manhattaners, aka Andrew: I took a picture of the majestic building and of the foyer through the letterbox - see the small Manhattans subset. I so wished I’d thought ahead and seen if I could have arranged to go inside… next time maybe. I also took a picture of the Back Bath Street roadside because we were passing and it felt it needed remembering since we forgot about the skipping at Christmas. Next time maybe for that too.)

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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I’ve been going through our photo collection recently to select some for uploading to my new photos gallery and it reminded me that John and I have seen some unusual sights (and sounds) during our travels, for example:

• just going out of shot but half a dozen men with mowers cutting a single piece of grass outside the Kremlin in Moscow.
• the open air reception outside the Winter Palace in St Petersburg for two bikers who had just got married.
• a reindeer gondola full of Santa Clauses punting along the Grand Canal in Venice.
• a door to the other side of the sand in Whitby.
• we were wandering the park land on Margitsziget (Margrit Island) in Budapest when we heard loud music - some large scale opera tune. We wandered closer to a small building - a cafe-like building but couldn’t see any speakers that could be kicking out that much noise but lo, there was a small curtain at one side of the building. Pulling back the curtain in a Wizard-of-Oz style, we expected to find the speakers but instead we found a full orchestra and choir on a stage rehearsing.