Cobwebs

Firstly, thank you so much for all the comments on my last post - the greyness suggestions were all fantastic and are being thoroughly researched and thought over (I'll report back soon) and it was also really lovely that there were a few requests for the dobby top to be turned into a pattern - it will definitely be added to my To Do list once school has restarted (although, we are all feeling slightly bereft that we only have two weeks left).

The last post aside, the colours in the photo at the top of this post as my daughter raced through the sand dunes captures the seasidey freshness of the last four days for me perfectly - we went for a long weekend away as a family and it feels as though many cobwebs were blown away on the blustery sea air and we've returned feeling completely refreshed, despite it being a somewhat short summer holiday.

With only four days at our disposal, we decided to not use too much of that time up with travelling and so chose to go to Rye, which isn't so very far away, but is somewhere we'd never ventured to before. We stayed at The George, which is the wonderful home of this fantastic bath, along with lots of other lovely things.

Photo courtesy of The George

As well as falling in love with the bath, you can see just beyond the bed that there is a little ladder, which leads to the 'pod' where our children slept. They were delighted by this den of a bed and even more so by the DVD player at the end of it, on which Harry Potter was screened every evening.

Rye, if you haven't been yourself, is a patchwork of cobbled streets, beautiful cottages, interesting antique shops, cream teas and ice creams. We were lucky to see it awash with sunshine for nearly every day of our visit.

When we weren't gooning around in the graveyard of the beautiful St Mary's...

...we were at the beach in Camber building sand castles

Although, I have to admit that my enthusiasm for building sandcastles stretches to the conventional type requiring four buckets of sand, a naive happiness that comes when placing a flag in a crumbling turret and plenty of time left over for biscuit-eating, so I eventually retreated to the picnic blanket to watch the rest of my family beavering away on this 5ft x 5ft extravaganza...and wondered at their endless enthusiasm for coming on holiday to willingly indulge in manual labour.

Although I found it as fascinating as they did to watch how quickly their hours of work could be toppled by the sea as the tide hurried in. We never tired of waiting for this sight each day. In this photo my daughter is standing shivering wearing my husband's jumper after spending too long in the sea.

I took away with me Getchen Rubin's The Happiness Project, billed by the Daily Beast as 'the rare self-help tome that doesn't feel shameful to read', however, the sea air made me too sleepy for bedtime reading and so I am only a few chapters in. However, I love the starting point for Gretchen's book, which is that it isn't necessarily for unhappy people...just happy people who wish to be even happier. Already it's crystallised my thinking into pinpointing exactly which things I could do to make myself happier...and they're so obvious that they feel almost achievable.

Florence x