Poor shores

Tomorrow it's 'fish and chips on the beach' day. A year on from being officially diagnosed with cancer (after many months of much faffing about) I met with a few friends to sit by the beach huts, eat takeaways while watching the sun set, and quietly celebrate me still being alive. I hoped it would be a regular thing (Well you would wouldn't you?) but friends got busy and moved on and it never really did, though sometimes I managed to quietly slip off and do something meaningful by myself without getting too miserable about it.

This year I give extra thanks in the extra poignant circumstances I'm going to be staying with old friends for the night...and next morning setting off for a trip somewhere. It was supposed to be the trip of a lifetime (bearing in mind the limitations of the short changed version I have) but even the brief budget option turned out to be beyond my insurable/advisable limits. I give thanks for Jan going along with my dream and not being a nightmare when I found it couldn't come true. I give thanks it means I'm not going on a plane... Never my favourite way to travel unless they're very small and I'm not often that rich! Er... and that I can still go *somewhere*. That I still want to...and think it's worth the effort, logistics getting ever more complicated and baggage ever more unwieldy, literally and otherwise. That I've thought of somewhere we can easily get to where neither of us has been before and where there should be both scenery and appropriate eateries within reach.

Meanwhile I give thanks for a quiet day in the neighbourhood and a restful contemplative time pottering about collecting bits and bobs to put in a little light case. The bonus of forgoing foreign or even UK off track travel being you know you can probably easily obtain anything you wish you'd brought. For a cross body bag to avoid a repeat of that nasty crook of the elbow accident...and that said body part has recovered enough to do a bit of crochet. For only partaking in unmessy activities and refreshments. Don't want to spoil the clean and tidiness before I go.