13 February 2011 (Sunday) - Rye Harbour

Another difficult night. I was fine all the time I wasn’t moving, but any attempt on my part to fidget set off the most intense pain in my lower back. Perhaps losing some weight might help my back: we’ve changed the rules of the podge-a-thon to having a weigh – in on a Friday rather than a Monday, seeing how everyone pigs out at the weekend. On Friday I found out I’d lost four pounds since Monday. Not bad – I just need to keep the weight loss in that direction until my back stops hurting.

The plan for today was to go for a walk around Camber Castle, but a combination of colds, oversleeping and chicken-related calamities put paid to our accompanying rabble. And bearing in mind that it was rather wet underfoot we decided to drive to Rye Harbour and walk along the tarmac path to the river mouth.

A good plan, but we arrived at Rye Harbour to find torrential rain and a hurricane. We tried walking, but after five minutes ‘er indoors ^TM went base over apex on some seaweed exposed by the tide. So we contented ourselves with looking at the boats moored by the lifeboat station before giving up and going back to the car. When the weather cheers up, Rye Harbour will definitely be somewhere we’ll be going to for a stroll, but not all the time it’s raining.

And then we drove into Rye to buy the makings of Sunday lunch. There is a large Budgen’s supermarket by Rye railway station that we thought we’d go shopping in. We got there at 1pm to find it was closed. How quaint!

With little else to do, we decided to come home the scenic way along the coast. We couldn’t believe our eyes. Kite surfers were braving the monsoon at Camber. We got out of the car and watched them for five minutes. They must have been mad – the wind was strong enough to be blowing me over, and I was standing on the beach. The kite surfers were flying along at a tremendous rate, and there were loads of them too.

But the cold was getting to us, so we set off homewards: via Tesco’s for the ingredients for dinner. There was an entertaining ten minutes spent at the checkout watching a poor mother dealing with her simpleton child. This young chap had decided he wanted to be a pigeon, and rather than using speech was communication in a series of billing and cooing, not unlike the noises made by the parrot (when in a calm mood). Sometimes when I look at other people’s children I realise that mine haven’t turned out that bad,really.

And so home – where UK Gold were repeating the Steptoe and Son film I’d slept through yesterday. So I was able to see what I’d missed, and to be honest I hadn’t missed much. Once awake again we watched something we’d recorded onto the Sky Plus: Alice – a remake of the classic fairy tale on the sci-fi channel. A sign that it was good was that I didn’t doze off…