Monday was Scarborough

 

and a School Gate Friend from Leeds. M lived quite near us and her son was the same age as Son No 1 and they were friends with one another so that was all nice. I occasionally looked after her daughter after school when M was working so we knew the whole family. We were still in Leeds when they moved away, to the Lake District and then, much more excitingly, to teaching posts for the parents first in Cairo and then in Hong Kong. Her son and ours have long since lost touch but  she and I never did although we hadn't seen one another since they left Leeds. So 20+ years. 

When they returned to Britain M and her husband settled in Scarborough but although I've been near there once for the Gaskell Society Conference it wasn't possible to see her then as the Conference program was packed and then I was on another whistle stop tour of people in Leeds before getting back to Orkney. So I was keen to catch up with her this time.

We had a lovely day although the weather wasn't particularly kind. We went to a viewpoint where I took the photo of the headland and we had lunch, and we also had a long walk around Scarborough Mere (of whose existence I had, until very recently and despite several trips to the town when  we lived in Leeds, been in total ignorance.) There were swans. Greedy swans. 

The OH is braver than me. I fed them on the water and on the ground but I didn't feed them from my hand! 

We had a walk along the front and a cup of tea and a visit to a lovely little craft shop where they had some amazing hand made stuff. I splashed out on a bar of rhubarb and rose soap. I have to say that we didn't buy much on this trip at all, the greatest  expense over the week was parking charges. Although we did buy a couple of presents for upcoming birthdays and Christmas for other people. 

Talking of parking charges on M's advice we had parked at the Scarborough Park and Ride and she had picked us up from there in her car. When she dropped us off we were approached by an official little man who informed us that we shouldn't have parked there at all if we weren't using the bus for the ride. We'd had no idea, and although I can see the point when we arrived there had been 4 cars in the car park including ours and when we left there were two, again including ours, and as the car park holds about 200 I did wonder why he was making such a fuss. I mean he was quite within his rights to tell us, and to warn us that if it wasn't  for him we would be facing a £60 parking fine when we got home, but he didn't really need to tell us that five times. Still we won't be doing it again. And M won't be advising anyone else to do it either!