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.)

1. We all lie on our backs with our paws in the air.

2. A very friendly tuxedo cat welcomes us to the cottage. He has the most perfect markings: even socks, a dapper moustache and the very tip of his tail is a crisp white too. A little later, I spot a completely black sibling on the window sill two houses down but they actually live next door to that: we see them following their dad up the secret garden built into the cliff.

2b. Higgledy piggledy houses; narrow cobbled streets, curving and free from traffic; and the hundreds of calling seagulls perched on the iron stained cliff: I heart Staithes.

2c. I stand on the … not beach, there is no sand at that point, only giant slabs of flat rock, broken up with pools. The sea is fierce – grey and angry – not far away but staying at a distance. I’m not far from the bend in the cliff but beyond it, I can’t see anything and behind me, everything behind the closest harbour wall is shrouded in fog too. It feels like I am at the edge of the world – no, the edge of existence.

3. As John naps, I sit Lily on my knee in the window seat. At first she is simply resigned to it (as she often is when we pick her up) but then she sees what I’m doing: her head turns so she can look at the harbour, then to the seagulls overhead, the people on the bridge… We sit and watch the world go by together until John wakes up.

4. The bistro is filled with pictures – lots of different styles and techniques but everything with a sense of fun. My favourites are probably the Leigh Lambert picture and the happy chihuahua.

4b. The cod cakes are rich and creamy – chunky but smooth at the same time. Later, I can’t believe the smoothness of cauliflower puree.

4c. The empty streets look magical in the mist. We wind our way home, and light a fire.

1. The orange of the chickens against the green leaves.

2. The necks of the pots sparkle when I flick on the light.

3. I expect it to start raining as soon as we step out of the door for our walk but it holds off. I enjoy the moss on the rock just beyond the squeeze stile, sit to let Lily graze on new grass in a small clearing and mimic the audiobook narrator’s characteristic pronunciation of certain words. Later, when the heavy rain does start, I find GingerCat sheltering in the wood store. Lily barks at him but Tilda is more inviting: she sits a little distance away and waits with him for the weather to pass.

4. The salad is sweet and tart and crunchy.

1. I call Kaufman from the balcony and as I turn to go back inside, I see him running along the path to the left of the house – he meows when he sees me: “I’m Kaufman, that’s me! Kaufman!”

1b. Thanks to Tilda’s reluctance to get in the cat basket, a wiff of TCP accompanies me throughout the day.

2. I’ve been trying to crack a design but I keep failing – it just won’t tile properly and the shapes aren’t right either. Then I take a step back and look at the pattern in a different way – the details aren’t in rotated squares, they’re in the spaces between circles.

2b. Drawing ideas for the pattern on graph paper of various sizes reminds me of creating or colouring similar intricate designs as a child: it conjures up the same feelings of pleasure and progress.

2c. Printable graph paper, with lots of different sized squares. The child/teenage version of me would be having kittens if she knew such things were just one click away. (She would also like the kittens.)

3. Strange and Lily sleep heavily on either side of me. The former adopts positions that, if they were upright and she was conscious, would be terribly active (she looks like she is running, or ready to pounce), while the latter twitches and pants as she chases dream squirrels.