Day 5: Penguins Not Included

Final day. As mentioned, breakfast was getting quite random but we managed to find enough to eat. Somehow we ate and cleaned and packed and left in pretty good time, remembering to write a quick note in the visitors' book. Before we left the castle, we had to return the keys which led to a lengthy chat with the castle owner about our route back to England. Skit took it all in and followed his advice (though I think it was just what she planned to do anyway).

We went through East Lothian and stopped off very briefly to take photos of Tantallon Castle. Skit pointed out that the rock behind the red coastal castle was not naturally white but covered in guano. Nice.

We passed into England with a little more ceremony on this route than when we passed into Scotland. There were bedraggled flags flapping in the breeze for both countries. Skit and biped entered into a discussion on Scotland leaving Great Britain which made me feel quite upset and annoyed with people at large for playing with my sense of national identity.

We didn't take any more stops until lunch time which skit had perfectly planned to coincide with us arriving at Bamburgh in Northumberland. It was just a village with a couple of shops and pubs but we could also see, looking downhill towards the coast, a large and imposing castle. The village was rather quiet despite it being a tourist spot on a summer's day. It was a weekday (this was the Tuesday after the bank holiday Monday) but I still wondered at the lack of business.

We went into one of the pubs and ordered lunch and drinks. I of course had a cup of tea (with more tea to follow) with also a jacket potato while skit and biped played with much larger meals. After lunch, we walked down to the castle.

Bamburgh Castle sits on the beach. We crossed some playing fields to get there, marvelling at the size of the castle, and scrambled across some sand dunes. Biped and skit took their shoes and socks off once we got to the sandy beach and raced off to paddle in the North Sea. I delighted myself in taking photos. It was cloudy but not too cold (we did joke about how we found Edinburgh so warm and sunny and England to be fairly miserable) and the beach seemed quite surreal by being so pale and flat and devoid of people. After skit and biped lost all feeling in their toes, we decided to go on a little walk along the beach and write “Not Everything is Significant” in the sand but each stroke was considered a separate letter resulting in a strange series of curves and lines that only we could decipher until the word “significant” which was in a readable state but written in a circle. Our final transitory message was simply “Hobblings”.

We popped back into the pub for some illicit toilet use and were yet again on our way. What followed was a tremendous feat of driving skill by skit as she demonstrated just how incredibly long England was. Bizarrely, I started to think of far-off, extreme north cities like Hull as “nearly home”.

Dinner (and an expensive fill of the petrol tank- this weekend must have been when petrol prices peaked) came courtesy of a service station. We had no time to stop anywhere nice (indeed, there wasn't really anywhere nice to stop once we got off the coastal road) as the day was closing in and we had so much ground to cover. Last minute decisions led us to decide to end the holiday at Banbury as from here both biped and I could catch trains to our homes and skit could drive about 40 minutes to her house.

I texted Amy from skit's phone to ask for train times and sure enough, we got to the station with good time for me to catch the train to Oxford. Biped was a bit reticent about catching the train to Reading and changing there for London and instead waited for a direct to London train. I hope she was okay with that. I was concerned to leave her but being utterly worn out beyond belief (being a passenger is oddly tiring), I left for Oxford, waving at her from the train window.

So, that was it. The weekend. It started on Thursday evening with a farewell to Kate who left to see penguins, progressed to Edinburgh where we got to see Czech's pretending to be penguins, the great Scottish country where biped pretended to be a penguin and then back to England again on the Tuesday. Not all segments included penguins. Not only was it another great holiday with skit and biped, it was also a fulfillment of an ambition (to see the fringe festival) and a correction of a great crime (never going to Scotland). Plus it was the start of a Significant new obsession. Get the book. You know you want to.