Midweek Sunshine

Wednesday

I worked in the morning, for my deadline at midday, having been up till 6 in the morning! So it was much like the previous day, except that J was working at home too, so she took some of her ‘requests’ to him. He also had the ‘willing facilitator’ thing going, so a good morning for all of us.

In the afternoon F and I went to the park for a couple of hours, expecting it to be teeming with children. Sadly it wasn’t - not sure if they had all gone home to their gardens or were in wraparound care somewhere. There were a few children there, so F ended up playing a bit with them.

Home again. Can’t remember much else, but it was a relaxed day and evening.

Thursday

The weather was so fine that I decided to take F to the nearest sandy beach I know of, which is at Littlehampton (if anyone knows of proper sand anywhere nearer to me, feel free to let me know for future exploration). I had never been before. We set off fairly late in the day, got a bus into Brighton, then a train to Littlehampton. We love train journeys, F and me, so that was enjoyable. Walked from the station down to the beach along the riverside walk, where there are loads of swans. It was one of those glorious days, blue sky, sunshine, slight sea breeze, delicious. We had such a lovely afternoon, we’ll definitely do that again.

We started with a paddle (had to walk miles, but that in itself was bliss, toes on sand, little shallows of warmed water, and it was the sort of beach where you don’t worry about leaving an unattended rucksack, at least you don’t if you’re me) and then did a bit of sandcastle building. Then I flopped on the towel for a while, keeping an eye on F while she did all sorts and helping/providing audience participation now and then.

She collected seaweed of many different kinds in her bucket, brought it back to decorate the sandcastles, dug a shallow moat around them, she did more decorating with little stones and shells. She tried to make ‘sand angels’ in wet sand and dry sand, she drew a picture of herself in the sand, then a picture of me and her, with pebble noses, looking pretty damn pleased with ourselves and with our arms around each other. Next she turned one of her sand angels into a picture of a fairy godmother and then added two more to be the fairies in Sleeping Beauty. Then she joined all her drawings together with lines in the sand (they were at quite a distance from each other – this entailed going round/through the breakwater several times) and started to tell the story of Sleeping Beauty using her sand pictures and the sandcastles as a palace - it was really good to watch, she was partly acting, partly storytelling and also drawing and adding effects as she went, throwing dry sand for magic dust, finding a pointy shell to be the spindle and that kind of thing.

F used a huge space for this beach multimedia performance piece. By the time she had perfected it and done an ending dance, it was really well past time to go home. After packing up all our stuff and seeing that someone had proposed and been accepted in sand writing further up the beach, we got an ice-cream and some chips on the way to the station and off we went. By the time we got home it was about 9pm, but we had had such a good time and were tired but happy. I had to start some work as soon as we got home and F decided she would curl up on the sofa and watch a film whilst getting dozy.