Need I say more?
I do? Oh, OK then.
This weekend’s brief cemeo appearance from that big ball of burning fire in the sky has left the RT team, like many others I suspect, positievly hungry for summer. As ol’ George Harrison quite rightly croons – Little Darling, it’s been a long, wet, lonely winter… (or something to that effect) – and, Little Darling, it does most certainly feel like years since it’s been here. But here it was this weekend and, like most of the rest of the population lucky enough to see temperatures over 12 degrees – we were packing up the car and heading to the beach before you could say “unseasonably mild”.
And it’s times like this that I realise how incredibly lucky we are to live in such a stunning part of the world. Like other Westcountry kids, I grew up with the luxury of only ever being 15 minutes away from a beach, and some of my strongest memories are from family holidays by the sea – whether it was basking in the sunshine or shivering under a blanket, the beach was a constant fixture in our lives. And on Sunday I got to take my little man for his second trip to the beach, where we enjoyed a glorious walk at Bigbury with the hound, and then a brief sit down on the rocks for him to have his afternoon snack (the little’un, not the pooch). It was a beautifully warm afternoon, not a cloud in the sky, and everyone on the beach was smiling. Memories are, indeed, made of this, and I sincerely hope come rain or shine, growing up by the sea will be something mini-RT comes to treasure as much as I do.
So lets hear it for the summer 2014 – sandcastles, ice creams, surfing, rockpooling (naturally), jam packed coolboxes and sandy sandwiches, much needed windbreaks, paddling, snorkelling, falling asleep with our sunglasses on and washing sand out our hair for days… It’s going to be awesome.