Back walking the dunes
During the last weeks holiday I’ve accumulated a huge work and personal reading backlog which I was determined to clear today, that meant some serious cafe time. I started at the Beach Terrace Cafe first thing, I’d not been for 10 days and they’ve changed their philosophy a bit, apparently customers are increasingly getting confused because they have to remember their table numbers, select their own condiments and collect their own cutlery. This often proved to much for people and they ended up making multiple trips back to the counter, oops I forgot the sauce etc.
Apparently they’ve decided to improve their quality of service in a number of subtle ways, for example the staff now hand people their cutlery directly and deliver condiments to the table just before delivering the food. I’ve mentioned this for two reasons, first it’s the biggest change I’ve seen in the 18 years I’ve been eating there and second it’s an interesting symptom of how people’s ability to focus seems to be reducing. As we all become ever more distracted in life even paying attention to the simplest things is becoming more difficult.
I liked the new system, because even though I eat there most days, I still forget my cutlery or sauce a couple of times a week! I soon got stuck into reading though and as always you can find my reading list at @steveisreading on twitter. I also managed to complete an ‘easy’ Sudoku puzzle in record time, although still not fast enough to move up from easy 🙁 even after 8 weeks of daily practice. I’m increasingly concious of the need to move frequently so I had to break up my reading with a quick walk to the beach and a bit of running on the spot, and it helps me to keep focussed too.
Once finished I headed south towards Lytham through the dunes, which is great exercise and ended up at Fairhaven Lake Cafe where I read got another hour before circling back via the Royal Lytham Golf Course route, one of my favourite sheltered walks (it was blowing a gale).
Once home I practised folding and unfolding the Brompton a few times and took it out for a short ride. My knee is still sore from my adventure walk last week so I wasn’t able to got far, and I had a lot of washing and ironing to get done. Unfortunately I noticed that the connection cable for the rear light was disconnected from the front light and the fittings are too loose to reconnect reliably so it looks like I will have to pop into Evans in Kendal some time soon, pity I couldn’t get the bike from Apple Bikes who are Brompton specialists and only 2 minutes ride away! The guy at Evans who demonstrated folding and unfolding had no idea what he was doing and must have yanked the cables in his fumbled attempts!
Chris had recommended that I watch Wainwright The Man Who Loved The Lakes, Jennie joined me and enjoyed it much to her surprise. She’s coming with me to Center Parcs next month so it was a good primer for what she has in store hopefully.
I’m currently downloading all three seasons of Wainwright Walks for further inspiration. Jennie started looking through the Wainwright illustrated guides that Chris brought round yesterday and was very impressed!
