1. Prawns and a good sharp cheddar – one of my favourite lunches.

2. It’s a little cold in the woods – a pleasant contrast to yesterday’s humidity. I pick up the pace to build up a layer of warmth underneath my coat.

2b. Two white tails wag a hello.

2c. I inhale the bluebells’ perfume until it makes my sinuses tingle. The next time I breath in, all I can smell is the most delicious curry.

2d. Lots of Jack by the Hedge by the road.

3. The thread looks like cotton but I’m assured it’s a blend of wool and silk. It’s smooth and wonderfully lustrous: a muted, truncated rainbow from red to green.

3b. As a break from my map project, I start a quicky Jacobean tile project. The design photo is surprisingly poor – the use of the wrong type of fabric makes it look blocky, wonky lines, blatantly uneven stitches — my work looks so much better. It gives me confidence in my stitching skills and also in creating my own designs.

1. I gasp, suddenly noticing the greenness of the elder tree and the woods beyond.

2. The richness of the rice pudding.

3. I surprised myself by not sewing while we were away – I took my current map project and supplies for two new projects, in case they took my fancy but in the end, I just read while we were in the cottage. It’s nice to pick it up again now we’re back home though: I stitch the next stage (footpaths, fields and the start of some walks) while listening to people talking passionately about our shared addiction.

1. Our eyes both stop at the same line on the menu. We definitely made the right decision about where to go for breakfast.

1b. The fog is so ridiculous that we ache from the laughter. A group of people in hard hats and hi-vis jackets near the cliffs make it seem sinisterly artificial; ghostly dark figures in the distance make it spooky; and a family still building sandcastles make it even more bemusingly surreal. Though we’re scared of losing her to the mist, Lily doesn’t seem phased by it at all – she gallops ahead and sploshes in the water as normal.

1c. I find a crab in the shallows and pick it up to show John. It hangs on with its rear pincers and when I put it down again, I’m left with a series of deep dimples along my finger.

2. Away from the coast, the sunshine is glorious. Fields of bright yellow and fresh green line the road back home.

2b. I’d forgotten how nice it is to go away at this time of year and return to the garden sprouting, blossoming and blooming. The cats circle me as I visit the chickens, then I sit down on the steps (with feline company) and just enjoy it all.

3. I’m flanked by Kaufman and Strange for much of the evening. I think they’re glad we’re back.

1. The mist stops suddenly above the green field. It is both unnerving and funny.

2. We all fall in love with Runswick Bay. We play in the sea on the way out and hunt for fossils on the way back. The sun comes out and we very nearly sit there all day, just watching the waves.

2b. The sea crashes and hisses with the occasional boom.

2c. John finds a fossil on his first try. I pick up little smooth stones until my pockets are heavy.

2d. (Whitby.) Two waves – the incoming one and the one heading out after hitting the sea wall – smash into each other and their spray sparkles in the sun. I could watch that all day too.

3. I’m not sure Lily knows quite where she is until we reach the gate to the nab then she starts pulling me down the hill, excited to be ‘home’ again.

3b. Several times this weekend I’ve sat on the bench pretending to read but actually just gazing out to sea.

3c. The mist closes in again. As we walk back from the bistro, the sky is a soft navy.

1. The seagull lands in a nest at the top of the cliff, just a couple of metres from where Lily is grazing. It drops food in its child’s mouth then calls out a warning. The baby seagull softly mimics its squawks.

1b. Good bacon, our eggs and a wide buttered slice of a cob.

2. We walk along the cliff tops to the north of the village, along the Cleveland Way. We spy instruments in precarious places, laugh nervously about the pathway that has fallen away, and identify bits of edible greenery around our feet. When we are ready to head back, we stop to watch the waves splashing against the rocks below.

3. It turns out that cosy catastrophe/post-apocalyptic fiction is just *the best* thing to read why staying in this type of little village. I inhale a new-to-me tale – “A Wrinkle in the Skin” by John Christopher.

4. The beck is so low for most of the day that I had forgotten quite how full it gets for the hour around high tide. It reminds me of Venice – in fact the whole village does in a slightly greyer, slightly more Yorkshire way.

1. We take advantage of the low tide for a walk before breakfast. The fog has cleared but the rock slabs are still unreal. Lily triumphantly sits in every single little pool.

1b. We hear a rush behind us and turn to see a flurry of rocks fall from the cliff. The seagulls take flight and we have a new reason to be afraid of that little bit of Staithes. (John says it sounded like a wave coming from the wrong direction and it reminds me something I’d read in my book the night before: after a catastrophic earthquake, the characters walk across a dried seabed and find it disturbing – fearing that the now long distant sea will somehow suddenly rush in. I realise that this is partly why the rocks slabs are disconcerting – we had been to Staithes for two short breaks before we even knew they existed so they feel like something recently uncovered, and the carved seams are like primal fissures in the earth, things that should have long been covered with soil or water.)

1c. I make a certain noise whenever I see a cat in the wild, and I make it a lot while watching yesterday’s handsome chap walking over the bridge – meercatting amongst the flowers at the beckside then meeting passersby for a stroke.

2. We go on a boat. Lily sits on the bench for a little way but then sits at our feet, seemingly less bothered by the excursion than going in the car. Large white waves crash against the cliffs in the distance but where we are the swells are smooth and solid. No one vomits.

2b. It’s Goth Weekend and everyone is parading around the town in their finery. The level of detail and work put into some of the outfits is amazing, and little children get excited about the idea of grown-ups in “fancy dress”. One little girl strops: “I want to be like them, it’s not fair!” (There are quite a few children her age who are dressed up – one girl carries as suitably spooky old fashioned doll, and gives a menacing stare to a camera when a photographer takes invited photographs of their family, and another girl loves being the centre of attention in a full neon green cybergoth outfit – her family are as boringly attired as us but seem full of love and pride for their happy daughter.)

2c. The man throws the end of his chips and the seagulls descend en masse, completely surrounding him. He laughs with pure glee and begs his girlfriend to let him do the same with her dregs.

2d. I forget that the beaches in Southport are peculiar – even at high tide, there is still huge stretches of open beach (in fact, we always try to visit at high tide otherwise it’s miles to the sea) – but high tide on normal beaches means, well, no beach. I’d long looked forward to running along Whitby’s shore with Lily-dog but for the whole four hours we’re there, the sea laps at the cliffs. We stop at Sandsend on the way back to the cottage instead – the sea, with proper waves (again, not like Southport) is still close in but there is plenty of sand and a band of the most fantastic pebbles. Our pockets are as heavy as Lily’s heart as we eventually turn back to the car.

2e. Compared to yesterday’s rain and fog, today’s simply overcast weather has been a vast improvement but it’s lovely to see a spot of blue sky and sunshine as the afternoon passes into evening.

3. The man rushes from his house clutching a wad of papers and runs down the hill. Someone in a car stops him to ask for directions: the man patiently explains the way with hand gestures and laughter, then once the driver is satisfied, the man starts running again, continuing on his urgent way to the lifeboat shed. (The car then drives back up the hill and, as I thought it would, it stops outside our cottage. I tell the little boy in the backseat that Old Jack is away on an adventure and we’re looking after the cottage for him. I promise to tell him that Kenzie popped by.)