annanotbob's Diaryland Diary
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When Daddy fell into the pond
I'd like to be on holiday now. A holiday like the one we had in a caravan in Dorset when it rained all the time.
I've been trying to work out when it was, but I can't quite place it, other than it being the year The Beach came out in paperback. I can remember that we left home on a blisteringly hot Saturday morning, straight into a traffic jam and Sam got into a shouting match with some guy who tried to cut him off, before we even got to my sister's place, just over the river.
Our convoy hadn't left the county when it started to bucket down with rain and this kept up for the whole week we were away. Luckily we were on a site on a clifftop - lower ground was flooded all over southern England that week. My family had a caravan and my sister's lot were in a chalet close by. We were right next to the clubhouse, which was a stroke of luck as the kids (the six cousins) spent hours on end in there, playing pool at 50p a pop. They were all rubbish, so each game lasted forever.
We adults were all knackered - I was teaching and the others all had stressful jobs, and we were a bit pissed off at the crappy weather spoiling our holiday. We did venture out at least once a day - we had to visit Lyme Regis for starters:
as we're all readers and the Cobb at Lyme (above) features in both Jane Austen's Persuasion and John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman.
But mainly reading was what we did. My friend Joan came down for three days in the middle of the week, also knackered, also a reader. Everyone had brought two or three books with them and we all just lay around all day, lost in literature as the rain beat down on the tin roof and the kids popped in every now and then for another 50p.
We arrived home absolutely refreshed and invigorated after having a proper rest. There was nothing at all that we 'should' have been getting on with, no real hassle, no difficult decisions to be made. I could do that now, lie in a caravan on a hilltop in the pouring rain, reading, looking up every now and then to see my sister and my friends all comfortable, just across the room.
Ah well. I just caught the tail end of some American on Newsnight talking about how the insuperable objection to 'socialised medicine' is the government coming between the people and their health care. This is a wonderful spin on how things work. In America, the matter of who is paying the bill sits between patient and doctor, surely? All the big guns are coming into play for this battle. Go Obama - set your people free!! I have seen 'Sicko', by the way, GBW, but found it hard to believe until I saw it for myself.
Sweet dreams xxx
|10:02 p.m. - 13/08/2009
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