Sun, rain, snow, sun... before lunch.
It's been interesting settling into a new lifestyle; especially when you've got no style and there's no signs of life down here either! Scored some evening work preparing rabbit food side orders, spinning blades and foaming soap in a military style kitchen run by an anal ex-engineer. Seems sound enough for now.
The village is a slowly awakening ghost town with the omen of the coming swarms hanging about like low cloud boiling. Mid-week I envisage dry wiry tumbleweeds curling their way through the dust and listen for phantom creaking of half-hinged tavern doors... the weekend sees a little more life. Sporty well rugged couples in expensive cars from fathers peer through windscreens perspiring from climate controlled interiors. The odd family bustle about the vast vacant beach clutching their kids like kites for fear that the wee ones be whisked away like plastic bags into the stratosphere...
Have braved the frigid waters a couple of times. So lovely to rehydrate again despite the cranium splitting ice-cream headaches come after too much duck-diving. A wild initiation to the Point was what really had my blood singing through the veins, adrenal gland pumping locomotive, synapses firing chaotic and the whole machine screaming life-threatening conflict between desired performance and current fitness levels. The Point, a craggy headland betwixt Croyde bay and the stretching golden brown of Saunton Sands, is a right-hander fringed with evil black vertical serrations of rock, submerging silently into the frothing sea to await the feast of flesh from the inept and the unfortunate.
'Starts warming up next month', crusty Croyde veterans in vans tell me as I hitch lifts from the next closest village in, Braunton. I'm roomed up with four other local lads in a weathered terrace house nestled in monk-like silence between two tiny pedestrian lane ways. The gardens of neighbouring geriatrics twist out colourful blooms, squealing premature against the morning's sun-spring masquerade before arctic gusts relieve the leaves from trees and the afternoon decays once more to winter.
The village is a slowly awakening ghost town with the omen of the coming swarms hanging about like low cloud boiling. Mid-week I envisage dry wiry tumbleweeds curling their way through the dust and listen for phantom creaking of half-hinged tavern doors... the weekend sees a little more life. Sporty well rugged couples in expensive cars from fathers peer through windscreens perspiring from climate controlled interiors. The odd family bustle about the vast vacant beach clutching their kids like kites for fear that the wee ones be whisked away like plastic bags into the stratosphere...
Have braved the frigid waters a couple of times. So lovely to rehydrate again despite the cranium splitting ice-cream headaches come after too much duck-diving. A wild initiation to the Point was what really had my blood singing through the veins, adrenal gland pumping locomotive, synapses firing chaotic and the whole machine screaming life-threatening conflict between desired performance and current fitness levels. The Point, a craggy headland betwixt Croyde bay and the stretching golden brown of Saunton Sands, is a right-hander fringed with evil black vertical serrations of rock, submerging silently into the frothing sea to await the feast of flesh from the inept and the unfortunate.
'Starts warming up next month', crusty Croyde veterans in vans tell me as I hitch lifts from the next closest village in, Braunton. I'm roomed up with four other local lads in a weathered terrace house nestled in monk-like silence between two tiny pedestrian lane ways. The gardens of neighbouring geriatrics twist out colourful blooms, squealing premature against the morning's sun-spring masquerade before arctic gusts relieve the leaves from trees and the afternoon decays once more to winter.