The Distant Hills

One of the things that I love about St Annes is the view of distant hills that keep tempting me to explore them.  To the North the Lakeland fells, to the south Snowdonia and to the east Rivingon and the West Pennine moors, today was one of the better days to admire those view and we all enjoyed them after a lovely family breakfast at Toby’s.

Although I tend to dislike weekends for their busyness, I do like the fact that the swimming pool opens an hour later affording me a more relaxed 7am start, ready for a 7:30 swim.  This means I get to sleep in, potter around more if I want to, or I have time for a walk or cycle before diving in.  Today I slept in and because the weather was wonderful I got to do a pre-swim cycle ride and then after, it being too late for Caffe Nero, I got to do a post swim ride, before heading to the Beach Terrace Cafe for an hours reading, and then I met the family.

After Toby’s Deb, Jen and I then strolled along the prom and into town, to walk off breakfast, whereas Tess decided to sleep it off!  I then circled back to the Beach Terrace Cafe to collect my bike.  A very busy morning, but a perfect one.

Once home I pottered around a bit before lunch, cut the lawn and had a nap, tidied up my vegetable beds and did some reading and cleaning.  I’m alternating reading, writing and watching right now, the reading is the superb Human Universe, a rare treat: excellent science, written with fluid humour and lots of opinion and story. It provides a real feel for how our knowledge about ourselves and our place in the world evolved, it’s highly recommended.  The writing is of course this blog, but also the glimmerings of a new blog and the watching is an old favourite TV series, “it’s not easy being green” a factual account of a families journey towards self sufficiency and the excellent PBS documentary about the future of food, today’s episode was about seeds.

So what’s this new blog then? Well since one strong contender for my future is to buy a smallholding, my ‘seaside life’ and associated steves.seasidelife.com blog might be coming to an end in a few years time.  To prepare I now own smallholdinglife.com and steves.smallholdinglife.com currently points to the smallholding category on my seaside blog.  I was surprised to find that I’ve been writing about self sufficiency for a so I have a handful of entries going back to 2006.  I’m planning to document my thought process and plans here and if I do end up as a smallholder than I will switch the name of the blog over.

I’m looking forward to next week, the kids will be back at school, Debbie will be back at work and I will start to do some more serious walks and cycle rides.