Louisa Parry :: Journal

Woke up around 11 again and after a cereal breakfast, I went to the butchers to pick up supplies for a planned cooked breakfast on Thursday while John got the fire going.

We stayed in nearly all day Wednesday for a lazy day - since that was the point of the holiday, to just relax and read until our heads exploded (we didn’t quite get that far though). We watched Shrek 2 (one of the DVDs in the cottage’s library) then read/drew in the morning. We had yet more soup, bread and cheese for lunch (because we dig soup, bread and cheese individually and any combination thereof) and then went out in the afternoon (with just our normal clothes over our pyjamas) to watch the waves - it was low tide but between the wind and rain, the sea was still pleasant rough.

When we got back, we had a game of Scrabble (I won, even though John got extra points for prettiness and being near a double letter tile) then had pasta and garlic bread for tea. We thought about watching another film in the evening but couldn’t decide on one so I had a bath then read in bed for ages and ages.

We woke up about 11 on Tuesday morning and had some breakfast. I forget what. Nothing exciting though.

Once we were fully conscious, we went for a walk along the breakwater and watched the waves for a good long while. Then we walked back past the cottage and over the foot bridge into the village, while watching a family of ducks: well, I say family but think it was a girl duck chasing two boy ducks because she wanted to be their faghag or something (the boy ducks weren’t having any of it). We walked around down to the little beach first then around the village but had missed the morning-only butchers and post office: made mental notes to go again in the morning sometime.

Since we were dressed and out of the house already, we decided to go to Whitby for lunch. It’s a lovely drive between Whitby and Staithes, right along the interesting coast, and when we got to Whitby, we parked by the harbour and walked down to the pier. We saw Wally from ‘Where’s Wally?’ who seems to have retired to Whitby with two black labradors, one of whom was carrying a tennis racket in his mouth (so cute), and we also saw lots of seagulls standing on cars and posts declaring themselves to be king of the seagulls or something. We watched them for a little while (seagulls, not Wally and dogs) then got fish and chips from the apparently infamous Magpie Cafe. We sat on the pier to eat them watching the various doggies (including Wally’s) playing on the beach. After we’d eaten, we went down to the beach ourselves to collect pebbles and found some small, not very interesting fossils (but since they were our first fossil finds, we were delighted).

Once we were done down there, we bought supplies (fudge and treacle toffee) from the town then went back to Staithes via Hinderwell for coal and wood.

We got the fire going as soon as we got back to the house and snuggled in for the night. Still full from the fish and chips, we just had bread and cheese for tea. For the rest of the evening, we read, drew and watched ‘Almost Famous’ - but bizarrely the video player on the laptop didn’t include any of the non-digegetic music for the second cd which we interpreted as a bold decision by the director to not use any background music in a film about a band. Yeah…

We read til far too late and didn’t get to sleep until after 2.

Left Leeds for Staithes at around lunchtime and stopped at Helmsley on the way for a drink and to pick up supplies (nice bread, petrol and wood). The last time we were in Helmsley (on the way back from a weekend in a country hotel near Scarborough) John lost £50 to a cash machine: we thought it was probably a little too late to follow it up this visit though…

Drove over the moors (well, not literally, we used the road) and passed the scary, huge RAF survelliance building up there, noting the big “Official Secrets Act” notice at the entrance. Oooh.

As per the instructions, we had to pick up the keys from the housekeeper at a house in an estate on the edge of Staithes but they weren’t in, so we drove on to find out where we should be going instead. We drove towards the Potash chimneys past Staithes village and were amused to see a sign for a “Dark Matter” research laboratory. It just seemed so out of place. Like it should be in Futurama or something instead.

Anyway, we drove back to the housekeeper’s house and got the keys from her husband (a lovely, green Geordie character) and then headed to the cottage. It is in the Cowbar side of the village so you have to go down a little bizarre road that feels like you’re going into a private farm yard, but lo, at the end of it the road opens out again and leads down into the Cowbar part of town.
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The original plan was to go away for Christmas - to stay in a cottage in the middle of nowhere and forget about the whole festive period - but we didn’t get around to that. So, instead, we went away for a week in January instead.

I saw a small ad in the Uni’s staff newsletter advertising a cottage in Staithes - Northside Cottage - and after gazing in wonder at the website for a while, we decided to spend a mid-week break there.

• Monday
• Tuesday
• Wednesday
• Thursday
• Friday

(Click on any of the pictures for a big version, more available on John’s Photo site)

The flight didn’t leave until 16.30 so we only had to leave for the airport at about 2pm. Our plan for the time was: bit of a lie-in then check out, breakfast at The Idiot (because we couldn’t be bothered finding anywhere else in the mainly residential area), go up St Issac’s as a goodbye to the city, then pick up a car from the hotel.

We woke up about 10am and looked out of the window, expecting the sunny weather we’d had previously to really get the most out of a trip up St Issac’s. It was foggy. So foggy we couldn’t see St Issac’s itself. “No, no,” I had assured John the day before, “it’ll be lovely weather. We’ll be able to see for miles.” Bah to my weather-predicting skillzz. We checked out anyway (the hotel cost about the same as the Moscow one but it wasn’t as much of a shock this time as we expected the tax) and headed up to The Idiot, thinking the fog might clear as the day went on.
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Friday was our main full day in St Petersburg; time-wise, Thursday had been a full day too but by the time we had got up and had lunch, it felt too late to start anything major.
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