It's Raining in Whitby

Well, here we are in Whitby in a tiny cottage. It's raining, and we have already been soaked through: we're sitting watching trash on the Disney Channel having stuffed our faces on very dry cheese scones that crumbled all over the floor. Our shoes, clothes and outer garms are drying on the radiators and smelling. The kitchen tap drips and the car is a million miles away, but that's Whitby for you. The shops are all out of umbrellas, and the one we managed to find turned inside-out straight away in the wind, and trashed itself before you could say 'vampire'.

True to holiday form, I got about five hours sleep last night because everything from the whole of my life visited me to torture my thoughts. This always happens and is why people go on holiday. I lay in bed and heard the church clock striking all the way to half past three a.m.

One of our party isn't very well, and my body is suffering because the builder who came to fix boards in the loft last week didn't have an assistant, and roped me into helping him to load the boards up the dodgy folding ladder. He said I needed new insulation and wanted more money for doing that, so I ended up doing it myself. I went on strike the next day, and he had to cut the boards in half in the rainy back yard and get them into the loft on his own, but my body damage was done. My back, my arms, my hips and my tolerance just said 'no'. He huffed and puffed and sighed big builder-volume sighs, but I was immune to his attempts to torture me with his pathos. Never again. No more builders in my house, ever, not even with the gigantic discount his conscience forced him into!

Before we came away I took seven black bags of filthy fibreglass insulation to the council dump. It felt so good to get them out of the house. I also mended the Dyson vacuum cleaner for the nth time. Dyson and Tim Wetherspoon epitomise sour 21st century entrepreneurial capitalism: things that work until they don't, and then the inventors/entrepreneurs sit in a corner snarling, despite having cleaned out the public with their enterprise, and stashed the cash somewhere safe from prying tax demands.

What an indulgent moan. It's also a holiday from being nice and tolerating things, just today anyway.