Last Seaside Days of Summer

For the last couple of years we have finished off the summer break with a short trip to the sea. Two years ago we took a day trip to the Norfolk coast, and last year a short break to Normandy. The fastest we can drive to the sea is about two hours down to the south coast, if there is no traffic. The east coast is a similar distance but slower roads, so we are less likely to go in that direction. We had heard good things about the Suffolk coast and the small town of Southwold in particular so decided to head out there for a short break. In the end we drove to Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, spent a day there, stayed overnight on the Norfolk / Suffolk border at Lowestoft, then spent the next day at Southwold before driving home. It took us just over three hours each way.

Great Yarmouth is a fair sized holiday resort, with the usual run of amusement arcades, funfairs, ice cream stalls and so on. More the teen daughter's idea of fun than ours, on the whole. Southwold, however, definitely lived up its reputation. We started off with a bit of time on the beach. Teen Girl is keen on photography and as she will be able to take it as an option at school next year we helped her to buy a proper camera this summer. Here she is trying to get pictures of splashing surf.

There were picture perfect painted beach huts all the way along the sea front.

We ate lunch at a cafe on the pier. It was sunny but very windy. We decided to ignore the wind and make the most of the opportunity to eat outside while we could.

Then a walk along the pier to blow the cobwebs away. This was the lee side where we were sheltered from the wind. The other side was very blowy!

We walked along the sea front, where we got this view of the beach and pier, then up into the town. There is a working brewery with a shop, and a little high street with a mix of gift shops, antique shops and galleries, clothes shops, tea shops and bakeries - quite up market.

The town even has its own lighthouse, slightly inland. I think we had just missed the last tour of the day, but in any case the rest of the family had voted not to bother climbing it.

That won't be our last sea fix for the year as we have one more lined up for next month - more cheap flights to somewhere that should be a little warmer than it will be here.

Goodbye Summer

School holidays are over - youngest daughter started back at school on Wednesday - and the summer weather has gone with with them. The evenings are starting to get a cool and tomorrow is forecast to be 14 degrees (57F) and wet. So, hello autumn! I have always loved autumn, not just because I have an autumn birthday. I like the colder weather before we hit the long dark evenings of summer, autumn colours, leaves crunching with the first frosts, and that sense of new beginnings. I think even when I no longer have kids going back to school or uni, I will still think of September as a "new year" month.

This year student daughter is back from Italy and will be heading back to Yorkshire for her last year at uni. She is very on the ball with job hunting and is already beginning to get applications in for grad schemes - I'm not sure whether the US has a similar system, but here many large employers have training roles for new graduates and begin recruiting for these up to a year in advance. She has some ideas for the direction she would ultimately like to go in, but is keeping options open and casting her net fairly widely. She has a house share all sorted, is signed up for all her preferred courses, and has put in a proposal for her final year dissertation. I am looking forward to being able to see the floor in the garage once all the stuff she has left there for the last 15 months goes back up north!

Her younger sister is now thirteen and is now at upper school. We are in one of the very few places in the UK which operates a three tier schooling system with kids moving to middle school at nine and upper school at thirteen, rather than two tier with transfer from primary to secondary school at eleven. I actually prefer the three tier system, though I think it is doomed to disappear in the next few years. She seems happy enough after her first three days at her new school. She chose to go across town rather than to our nearest school, but quite a few of her friends made the same decision so she has enough familiar faces not to feel lonely. Our school exam system means that she will have to start making specific subject choices this year for exams to be taken at sixteen (GCSEs), then from sixteen to eighteen they usually only study three or four subjects, before narrowing to just one or two at university. She is also beginning to have ideas of the sort of things she would like to study - unlike her older sisters she leans to the science side. She is also keen on drama and musical theatre and wants to take part in both a school production and a youth theatre group this year, as well as continuing to dance a couple of evenings a week, so she will be busy.

Politics is utterly depressing, with the Brexit debacle now reaching crisis point and the government pushing the legal and constitutional boundaries to try to force it through at any cost. One positive is that it has forced the opposition parties to work together, and there have been a significant number of defections from the government leaving it powerless to get anything through Parliament. It should now legally be blocked from crashing the UK out of the European Union without any transitional arrangements, but will try anything it can to avoid or subvert the law. A general election is inevitable in the near future, which will I am afraid be both the most important and the most bitter and unpleasant of my lifetime. I am tempted to spend the next two months reading Terry Pratchett and avoiding all media, but my inner historian feels compelled to follow every stage of the whole wretched process.

If I could manage to ignore the whole sorry political mess I would be looking forward to this year's autumn reboot, but it does overshadow everything at the moment. That aside, I am looking forward to getting back into more of a routine, getting on with a couple of writing projects I am working on, getting outdoors and enjoying the autumn weather, and generally getting into my "new start" groove.