My friend Governor’s Bay Jay has made a short-term house swap and is currently ensconced in Yorkshire, where she is venturing satisfyingly far and wide and chronicling her adventures. I recommend her prose.
Her most recently-recorded visit was to Whitby, whose charms merited multiple posts. I delighted in the images accompanying the narrative, since they reminded me anew of my own journey to Whitby — like GB Jay, from York — in the northern summer of 2000. Since I was travelling in high sunshine rather than rain and snow, this made something of a difference to my experiences, but many things were the same. I too headed straight for the Abbey and marvelled both at the ruins and the view, the former set in motion during the dissolution of the monasteries, and, like other northern monuments, given a general gutting-for-resources (in this case, stone) by locals in subsequent years.
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I am at present flooding 
I am not much enamoured of my lyrical gifts at the moment, but am writing my way through the funk in hope of producing something that’s less, to my reading, jejune. I can’t think of a better solution (ignoring the cheap seats’ solution which is always, stop for a while).
By curious coincidence, 
DandyID
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Anniversary Labours
17 February, 2010
in O internet, at home, commentatrix, dogs, in Aotearoa, we are family
Adventures with Average Baby
This spring-and-summer pregnancy is already twice the length of its winter predecessor, and as different, thereby, as two things of the same kind can be. Not least among these differences was the way in which we passed the first eleven weeks in a kind hopeful lockdown, wary to put too much pressure on the future to carry hope that might yet be redundant again.
The brain, the spine, the beating heart that was our gift before Christmas opened the door to a different kind of experience, territory as unknown as the very notion of being pregnant was the first time around. The tremendous good fortune whereby my morning sickness (a most inadequate moniker) receded by New Year has given me back my old ability to think about anything other than how terrible I feel (and the accompanying certainty that nobody understands or cares sufficiently) and something of a hopeful forward-gaze.
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