Snatching the best bit....

Went to see my mum at the weekend with the boys and surprise her with "something extra" - as the boys put it - my sister! I love being by the seaside so much it must be in my blood and we managed to grab a perfectly golden afternoon in-between all the lashing rain, and even have ice-creams! Something wrong about that fluffy ice cream that coils out of the machine (never without a flake!) but especially in January...god knows what it's made from but it's GREAT! When I used to do flits to New York in my twenties whenever I could rustle the money together, I had an obsession (with food, or not eating it, but that's another story...) with Tasti-Delite and they had tiny shops dotted around Manhattan, and would change the flavour every day, in fact you had a choice of two flavours or original vanilla AND it was only 40 calories!!! I would have a little pot - not wanting to waste calories on a freaking cone for god's sake! - once or twice a day and it is the only thing I've ever tasted that is quite like that weird British seaside ice-cream in texture and taste.....

Duke took his remote controlled car which my mum kept saying was £5 very well spent, and worried dogs whirring along the promenade with it...

Joe kept us entertained with an imagined catalogue shoot...


We even saw some enormous kites and realised they were attached to boys on wheels hurtling along with their jeans under their buttocks but they defied gravity and stayed up, or up as far as they were in the first place...

Anyhoo, not much else to say except don't wait 'til summer to go to the beach, it's bracing but beautifully lonely in the winter, and the ice-cream tastes even better!


Madame xxx