weekend update

This weekend I went to Newcastle with Hamish to visit my friend Abby and set up a few things on her shiny shiny new computer, which is very impressive! Mostly what we spent our weekend doing though was walking on beaches (along Tynemouth beach from Whitley Bay on Saturday and then up the beach at Bamburgh to the castle on Sunday.) Later today when I'm at home and can ftp, I promise I'll put up a little photo album for you all but if you're reading this before Tuesday evening you'll just have to be patient and use your imagination.

Beyond the impending photos I'm not going to do a "what I did at the weekend" type entry because it would be very long and probably not all that interesting to read. I'll just say that I had a lot of fun hanging out with my friends and exploring more of Newcastle.

What I am going to post about though is the sea: I miss living within walking distance of a beach, much like you might miss an old friend. In my first year at Aberdeen Dad used to joke that the beach was my best friend and he wasn't far wrong at the time: I spent whole days down there just walking or sitting or reading... just being... and I loved it.

Even after I got over my own shyness, and had places other than the sea to go to from my isolated little self-catering hovel - and even people to go and be with! I'd still visit the sea as often as I could. In the early days of first-year I quickly found that everyone I wanted to be with, lived away down in the catered halls on campus. The self-catering student village I'd chosen to live in seemed populated entirely by noisy nocturnal creatures I had nothing in common with except (mercifully!) my sleeping patterns. Not living where 'everyone else' was it took a couple of months of being alone most of the time, before I really had any kind of social circle in Aberdeen.

As the city warmed up socially I found many of my new friends were as infatuated with the sea as I, and we'd go in twos and threes and twentys down to walk on the sand as often as Artic Circle weather would permit (which is more often than you might think!) My best memories of that city have as their sound track the music of friends' voices against the precussion track of sea on sand...

After I moved to Edinburgh the sea and I became the kind of old friends who only get to see each other on weekends and holidays, but every time I'm near it I feel charged, especially when it's as animated as it was this weekend. One day I'll live by the sea again, but in the mean time I must make sure to visit it more often.