I Heart Southwold.

It was my parent’s 35th wedding anniversary last week, so my Mum, sis and sis’s friend Helena headed to Southwold on Thursday night, whilst myself, Dan and my Dad headed down there after they finished work on Friday evening. 35 years ago, my parents visited Suffolk and Southwold for part of their honeymoon. My parents have been together for 45 years really – they met when they were teenagers at the Dorothy in Cambridge.

It was lovely to get away from London for a few days. I’ve been feeling stressed and frazzled recently, as though I needed a break and space to think clearly. There’s nothing wrong with living in London – in fact most days I feel lucky to be a short train ride away from the city, but there’s something about going to the seaside that just clears the cobwebs and makes you feel better. I always come back from holidays with a bit more perspective and (most of the time!) thinking about what my priorities are. There’s lots of things that I want to do, and some of them need me to be more focused, rather than splitting too much of my attention on social networking so that my writing gets put on the backburner.

Southwold is a lovely place – full of quirky little shops, a few Cafés (like The Two Magpies Bakery), pubs and is one of the best places on the UK coast for beach hut spotting (and photo ops!). This time we stayed in a lovely flat overlooking the high-street – it was a flat on 5 levels, so though they called it a flat, it was more like a mini-house! There was table-football (foosball?) in the loft…

The pier is cute too, and is just what you imagine a sleepy little seaside town to have. The beach is both sandy and rocky – the best of both! On Monday afternoon, Dan and I popped in to Beaches and Cream, a sweet shop/ice-cream parlour, and I had one of the best tubs of gelato I’ve ever had (they sold both ice-cream and gelato) – Marscapone, Pear and Chocolate…

“A fragrant breeze wandered up from the quiet sea, trailed along the beach, and drifted back to the sea again, wondering where to go next. On a mad impulse it went up to the beach again. It drifted back to sea.” – Douglas Adams, The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.