The tide timetable on Pat's fridge is held up by a magnet shaped like a crab, and for seven days it ran our lives. Keith checked it every morning the way other people check the weather, announced "low water at ten past two", and the whole house planned around it. Nobody wore a watch. It was the most relaxed I've felt since February.
We spent Saturday 2 to Saturday 9 August at Rob's parents' in Filey, where they've lived since 2019. It's an hour and three-quarters from Headingley on a good day, and Alfie asked whether we were in Filey yet six times before York. The kids call them Grandma and Grandad. Pat was on the doorstep with a tea towel when we pulled up, which is how I knew she'd been watching for the car since three.
The week in brief
- Saturday: cheese and onion pie, chips, and camp beds in the back room, inflated by Keith with a foot pump from about 1992
- Sunday: the beach, then a full roast at lunchtime at 28 degrees, because Pat does a roast on a Sunday
- Monday: Filey Brigg
- Tuesday: Scarborough, in the rain
- Wednesday: the beach again, low water at two, a moat Rob designed and Alfie refused to let anyone improve
- Thursday: Pat and Isla in the charity shops, Keith and Alfie hunting fossils, and Rob and me on the sofa, doing nothing on purpose
- Friday: chips and ice creams on the front, and then more
The Brigg
Filey Brigg is a long ledge of flat rock that reaches out into the sea like a pier somebody forgot to finish. A sea fog had rolled in by nine on the Monday, so we walked out in what felt like a cloud, with the foghorn of a distant boat and Keith in front with a flask. By eleven it had lifted, and the rock pools underneath were suddenly bright.
Alfie found fourteen crabs, a starfish, and what he said was a fossil. Keith examined it for some time and said it was "a very good stone", which is the most diplomatic thing I've ever heard anyone say to a five-year-old. Isla found a hermit crab and named it Gary. She put it back, after a long speech about how it would be better off.
The wet day
On Tuesday it rained from breakfast, a proper grey drizzle that the sea wore like a coat. We went to Scarborough anyway, because that's what you do. Nobody could face the beach. We found a museum on the cliff top, a round building full of fossils, where Alfie stood in front of a case of ammonites for twenty minutes and told a stranger about them. Then we sat in a seafront shelter and ate fish and chips with the gulls watching from the railings, a little too interested.
The arcade was the best part for Alfie. Keith had brought a bag of 2p coins, about £5 worth, and Alfie spent forty minutes feeding them into a machine with a shelf of coins that pushes forward and never quite falls. He won a keyring and was thrilled. I decided not to tell him what the keyring cost against the coins.
Too many chips, and what it cost
By Friday I had counted chips on four of the seven days: Saturday, Tuesday, Wednesday on the beach and Friday on the front. On Thursday Alfie told me he "was chips now". Ice creams were £3.20 a go, and Rob did the sums on the back of a postcard and put it in his pocket before I could read it.
What I noticed was what we didn't do. For one week, nobody said "out of the door by 8:32". Nobody checked a clock at all, and we ate when we were hungry and the tide was right. Alfie got up at ten past six every day, and I let him go down to Keith, who had the kettle on, and went back to sleep. I haven't done that since Alfie was a baby.
The stay was free. Petrol there and back was £46. The days out, the arcade, the chips and the ice creams came to about £150, including Rob insisting on paying for the Friday chips for all six of us. I took a lasagne and a tub of flapjacks for Pat's freezer, which she pretended she didn't need. All in, about £196 for a week by the sea, or £28 a day for four.
We got home on the Saturday evening with two bags of sandy towels and a boot full of sand that I expect to find in October. Jean had fed Mabel and kept the tomatoes alive, and left another note on the table. It said, "Cat fed. Tomatoes fine. Mabel still sulking." She'd underlined the last word twice.
