A Trip to the Beach

If anyone has any alternative titles, that 'Doug's Oracle Blog' is looking increasingly fraudulent!

My (sshhh, whisper it) real family are in Sunny Spain. As I'd decided to rent a bigger car that could take all of their luggage to Glasgow Airport, I bowed to the pressure at home and agreed to take my other family for a Sunday trip to the beach.

There was a short debate about two issues.

1) Madeleine is quite happy to relate to all family members when we're at home. Unfortunately she works at the car rental agency that we rented the car from and was somewhat less keen on her work colleagues seeing the boys when we returned the car. But that's where a Hotsos Symposium bag comes in handy.



2) Who would be going? A recent head-count reached 23, so the family's becoming a bit too big for everyone to come along.

Fortunately, Bill wanted to stay in and watch the cricket, Flatcat felt it would be too hot for him and The Rabbit wanted to keep up his drum practice. He changed his mind in the end, but we managed to whittle it down to manageable numbers.



We decided to drive along the coast. We're pretty lucky in Edinburgh, like most areas of Britain, in never being too far from the sea. As a kid, most of our holidays consisted of renting a flat above a pub or a shop for a week in one of North Berwick, Gullane or Dunbar so it always evokes happy memories for me. First up was Gullane, but we were a bit late heading out and the weather is beautiful this weekend so we couldn't even get up the road to the beach. Gullane is just a little village but the beach there is one of the best. Some of you will know it better as the home of Muirfield. I suppose the whole area is a golfer's paradise, but that's not my cup of tea.

Rather than sitting in a traffic jam for the beach, we decided to press on to North Berwick because that's a bigger town. The sight of the Bass Rock always fills me with child-like wonder, probably because I know an ice cream is likely to feature in my immediate future, but also because it's such a bizarre sight, stuck in the middle of the bay, white with birds (and droppings).

On arrival we switched into full-on British child mode. We hit the chip shop straight away for fish and chips which we eat sitting in the sun near a war memorial, as wasps chased us around. Then we headed to the harbour.

I was hopeful I could get you a nice picture of the Bass Rock, but in his defence, he's not a professional model. I think his ear was blowing around in the breeze. By this stage Madeleine was walking a good 10 yards away from me at any moment in time, acting as though she didn't know me for some reason.

Next up were '99 cones. They had several ice-cream flavours but vanilla is the only sensible option with a Flake. I reminded Mads that it's compulsory to push your Flake right down into the ice cream so that you can hide it and add to the enjoyment as it's revealed.

We walked along the beach for a bit and then, with Mads well and truly blushing and on the verge of breaking off our engagement, I took one last group photo to remember our day. They were fascinated by the sand worm holes.




Back row (L-R) - Brian, Derek Junior, The Bear with no nameFront row - The Rabbit, Polly Piggy (obscured), Frank, Tiggs

A wonderful time was had by all. Perhaps the only slight dampener was that we visited a sweet shop selling all manner of old sweets to increase the nostalgia and Mads felt compelled to buy some Strawberry Bon Bons. Imagine her disgust to find when she bit into her first one that, rather than being filled with toffee, it had some ridiculous white, modern chewy substance in it. Okay, so we need to buy 100 grams rather than 'a quarter of', but there's no need to resort to toffee-substitute. I'd rather hoped that this blog might be a pleasant reminder of Blighty for some ex-pat bloggers (you know who you are) and then travesty invades.

She still ate them, obviously