2 April 2010 Good Friday

It didn’t start out good. I went to the post office to buy stamps for a letter I really needed to mail and it was closed. I was dumbstruck for a minute. But it’s Friday?

Good Friday. That’s a “bank holiday” in the UK. Apparently a postal one as well.

Then I went to the grocery store and got caught in a downpour. It was sunny when I went into Waitrose and then “chucking it down” when I came out. It does that here.

(I love not having a car except when it’s chucking it down and I have 3 heavy grocery bags to lug to our flat and the wind turns the rain into sideways rain and I have to walk with my head parallel to the pavement to cut through the pushing wind and water and it feels all heroic and hard but really I’m just walking home with the groceries, sheesh, get some perspective, woman.)

Anyway, it rained for a couple of hours. Then it cleared. It does that here too.

So we went out to walk along the promenade to the Brighton Marina to check out the Brighton boat show and to meet up with one of AC’s colleagues and her mate. The boat show was pitiful (3 boats!) but the colleague was lovely. It started to rain (again) and so we ducked inside a pub for a drink.

We emerged from the pub and it was sunny. So on the walk back we stopped to fly kites on the beach. What you can’t see in the above picture is the dog chasing AC’s foil kite. Back and forth, back and forth, barking and sprinting and back and forth, neck craning he wanted that kite so badly. Then the kite fell. The dog pounced on it. He kneaded it with his paws frantically, triumphantly. I don’t know enough about dogs to fathom why– maybe he was trying to bury it? Eventually his owner pulled him off and hauled him away from the flying rainbow in the sky.