Scarborough Fair. Whitby Poor.

I'm growing more frustrated by the day as the flat spell continues. There was a calf-high wave dribbling into Scarborough this morning like a pensioner on a day trip. Even that was almost tempting. If it wasn't grey, wet and cold, I might have gone in anyway, just to remind myself what wet feels like. (I know what grey and cold feel like. My van).I've even had to change the screensaver on my computer. For several weeks it was one of the photos of Thurso East (here), But it was too depressing seeing it on my screen, so I've replaced it with one of Tynemouth (here). It's still depressing, given current pond-flat conditions. But at least, if the waves pick up, it's still only an hour up the road, unlike Thurso which, at the speed my van travels, is about 15 hours.

Thankyou to all of you who used the blog to send me birthday wishes. So that's you, Nu. It's nice to know I have one friend out there.

My extremely industrious sisters worked out that what I most needed for my birthday was a bath (probably why I've only got one friend out there.) So they very generously booked me into a charming self-catering chapel. Fortunately while the vicar wasn't looking, someone's transformed it into a comfortable holiday cottage, though they've kept an altar-like island kitchen unit, in case the congregation return. It was fantastic! Running water, a proper bed, TV, microwave. All the mod cons you're unlikely to find in a van (and I certainly haven't found in mine). Karen came up and we cooked another pheasant. Not road-kill, this time. Gun-kill, presumably, judging by the lead shot. Either way, it came ready-plucked from the butcher at Proudfoot (like Tesco, only nice).The smaller one keeping it company is a partridge, in case the pheasant wasn't enough. It was, so I've been eating cold game since Saturday. There are worse things to have in your fridge.

We went to Whitby, home of the Synod, Dracula and Captain Cook. It's probably lovely when the sun shines. The sun didn't shine and it wasn't.In a town with the highest proportion of fish and chip shops per capita in the UK (a statistic I have conveniently invented for literary effect), we managed to stumble on the absolute worst. Even the seagulls stopped flocking round when they saw where we'd been. Whitby, home to the pickiest scavangers in the UK.
So now I'm kicking my heels in a grey, wet Yorkshire, waiting for the waves to pick up. End of the week, possibly. If not, I'm selling the van and buying a one-way ticket to Hawaii. There's only so much flat water a surfer can stare at before he/she goes mad.