shewhomust | A wet Sunday on Lindisfarne

Written on Sunday, then, with two streams of thought shaping up to be posted.

One was about holiday houses, things you find in them, things you don't, how people choose the pictures to hang on the walls, whether a double bed so generously sized that you have to turn sideways to move round the room is a good thing or a bad one... Hedgehope Cottage is perfectly comfortable, but like every house it has its peculiarities: two spacious rooms downstairs (kitchen-diner and sitting room) but a cramped entrance hall which gives the opposite first impression; the one tiny window in the dining area is presumably an architectural choice (in the interests of authenticity. perhaps?), bur why are there so few knives, and such flimsy forks (which don't match the knives. or each other)?

And so on. The other was about stepping outside the back door at ten o' clock on Saturday night, having washed up after dinner and wondering whether the little courtyard that contains the bins is enlosed or a through lane - and walking down to the street just above the church, then realising that that cooing I am hearing is not woodpigeons but seals, and following it down to the beach in the cool silver evening.

Sunday morning on the jetty,

helenraven said "The sound of waves lapping, and swallows flying low, what more could you ask?" I couldn't argue with that.

Monday was bright and sunny, though, and there was circumambulation of the island. D. arrived in time for dinner and drinking. This morning

durham_rambler and I delivered

helenraven to her train in Berwick, and are now in Barter Books, where there is wi-fi, on our way to Phantoms at the Phil.