See the Sea

The smell of the briny sea  brings it all flooding back, the memory of the early seventies.

My family weren't rich and couldn't afford to holiday abroad, so had to be contented, to 'make do',  so my parents said, with a week in a 'chalet' on Aberdeen Beach looking out to the grey North Sea. 

The chalet was basically a glorified shed, painted in bright summery colours, and was a good place to be when the sun was shining, which wasn't every day in the North East. 

We wouldn't stay overnight in the chalet, but use it on a daily basis for picnic lunches, dips in the sea, when the weather was warm enough, and watching the tide come and go on a colder day, while sipping tea from a Thermos flask.  I imagined this to be a far cry from what my school friends would be experiencing with their holidays to places like Majorca, which seemed to be a popular place to go.

That was the year I learned to paint and draw pictures of the sea and sky. I didn't like going in the sea as it was often too cold, but would take my library book to read, and my little paintbox, brushes, and sketch book.I was hoping that I could maybe be an artist or a writer when I grew up, my parents although not rich, were always hoping, and that's a quality , if you can call it a quality, that I inherited.