• Brian was a good rock. Found on the beach (and sort of coffin shaped) he became destined to be buried on an anglesey beach by a 10-year old. The tide out, and all the family around.
  • We played along with acting out this poor rock’s funeral. Solemley laying our limpet hats around the burial site. Talking about how good a rock he was. Knowing the tide would come in, and Brian’s small place within the huge beach would be lost forever
  • But the limpet hats acted like a marker and we spent the week unearthing Brian the rock at every low tide.
• Yes, it’s the return of our yearly pilgrimage to Anglesey. Comforting in its similarity to every year since I was born. Apart from the time where they built the A55, and a couple times where I had to work, or that one time i was in Mongolia.
  • Going to the same place every year is like a game of spot the difference, but you see the original picture 365 days ago. Your memory forgets certain differences. You might think that the bathroom in the holiday house has been repainted, but someone else might remember that this was done last year.
• Our middle daughter has so much energy, it’s like her body squeezes so much juice from every tiny morsel of food she eats. On beach trips this summer she runs and jumps and runs and jumps and runs and runs. Then complains that we don’t feed her snacks.
• “It’s so far to our holiday house, It’s a thousand hundred steps back from the beach, a billion steps”
  • “Not even sure you’d take a billion steps in your life” i replied
  • “Would a millipede take a billion steps?”
  • cue the invention of the billipede. Something that would obviously take a billion steps.
• We sat in the car eating ice cream while the rain washed over us. Buckets and buckets. A grey that only a Welsh beach holiday can deliver. The stone, slate grey. The water, slate grey. The sky, slate grey.
• The youngest made a big impression on yet more of our family and friends. This time by playing “BASH BASH” and hitting her hands on things, or low growls and grabbing their feet or arms with her mouth, or trying to run before she can even walk by gripping their teenage fingers with her little mitts and padding the floor like crazy with her tiny doughy toes
• our holiday week overlapped with the ring o fire ultra marathon. the middle daughter, my mum and me went early one morning to witness the start. After seeing the participants run into the grey morning and after taking some excellent photos with Holyheads official town crier. We spent the next 26 hours live tracking the runners, marvelling at the efforts of them running through the areas we’ve come to know.
• Our eldest said “This holiday feels so comfortable”.