Back to reality

 It feels like a few weeks ago when I was talking about spring springing at last - after the longest wettist winter I can ever remember.

Spring never did really spring, it kept on raining, then Summer arrived and I was still in jumpers and the rain continued to fall.

Last week the sun came out at long last. We had long days of sunshine and the weather got much hotter. Thought it was extremely muggy - I think everything is just so damp. Lucky husband was on holiday again last week (he's booked every other week off), so he and son spent most of the week paddle boarding.

I, however, went back to work. We're really short staffed at the moment because two people are off on long-term sick and two have left and haven't been replaced. So we are a skeleton staff, but the workload hasn't dropped. 

I've picked up two projects that do not lend themselves to my skillset. I'm pretty sure I can do them, but it's going to be a tough slog to get to the other side. As a result the week absolutely flew by. 

Apart from work not much happened during the week - although on Thursday night I took the full force of my teenage son's sharp tongue - after a tough day at work it was more than I felt able to cope with. I get quite claustrophobic in these situations. You are trapped in a house with people you don't want to be with. So I had a quick shower, smartened myself up and because it was a lovely evening I just left the house.

I walked down to the seafront. On the way I picked up a sandwich for supper and a drink and ended up having a lovely evening sitting on the beach enjoying a warm summer evening. 

On my left were a load of teenagers climbing a large concrete groin. I was just looking at them impressed they were not doing anything too stupid when suddenly they started doing backflips off the groin into the sea. Now this may not sound too stupid to you, but the groin was about 15 feet high and the water they were doing backflips into was about 3 foot deep.

I ended up staying longer on the beach than I'd intended because I wanted to be there if an ambulance needed to be called.

Other than that the beach was quiet, I was sad to see that day trippers had left 2 deflated rubber rings and a small deflated dingy. When will people learn. As light faded I got up to leave, intending to pick up the rubbish as I went, when a man came out of the sea carrying a bicycle - not something you see every day huh!

Full of curiosity I asked him what was going on and he explained that a day tripper had chucked two of the electric bikes you can high locally into the sea. He was getting them out so they didn't get swept out when the tide changed.

So turns out that the beach litterers with the rubber rings and dingy were not the most ignorant day trippers after all! Anyway, he said to leave the rings and dingy because he had plans for them, so I left the beach and wandered home.

Not long after I left husband got in touch in a panic, because I'd been gone for so long. I explained I was safe and walking home along the road (I'd normally go through the woods).

It was a positive approach to the situation because by the time I'd got home I'd calmed down and son had also calmed down. So we all went to bed quite happily.

A quiet weekend followed this, I was pretty much glued to the sofa. I watched some Olympics and also watched a box set on iPlayer (didn't know they did box sets until the weekend - may as well make use of them we pay our licence fee and I rarely watch BBC). 

Ah I haven't mentioned the photo yet. At the beginning of the post I was moaning about the weather and saying that it felt like spring had only just sprung. Well on one of my walks I went to the fields where it feels like just a few weeks ago I was excited about the corn sprouting. Just look at it now, the corn has grown and has dried, it's almost ready to be harvested. It feels like the whole thing happened overnight.