Nice to wake up to sunshine on a day when we're travelling westbound. Kath is even further west than we will be in Tenby. She flew to Dublin yesterday for a conference in Galway for those working with Early Years children in the Arts, and was travelling by coach to her destination into the setting sun, as we were having supper.
After breakfast, a morning spent finding things and packing what I need to take with me - equipment and clothes. Clare started two days ago on personal baggage and food for the week, as we're self catering. It took us all morning to pack the car. Instead of taking a picnic we had lunch at home and left at one thirty. With one stop at Pont Abraham, we made it to Tenby and 'Bryn y Mor', our holiday apartment by four fifteen. It's spacious, with two bedrooms and two bathrooms on the ground floor of a four storey mansion, probably Edwardian, set on a hill, facing the sea, a mile from the town centre, facing south, so the terrace outside the lounge cum kitchen-diner benefits from sunshine most of the day.
The down side was unloading the car. Six trips up to the terrace from the assigned parking place. Aerobic exercise after nearly three hours driving! The other down side was the absence of toilet paper, with no BYO alert in the booking material. I left Clare to unpack food supplies, and walked a mile down the main road to find the nearest shops, just before closing time at five. Tenby is far less busy at this time of year so there's less need to stay open late. It gets two and a half million visitors a year, and needs recovery time off-season. Not only did I acquire toilet paper, but a sketch pad and a couple of black pencils, as I propose to do some sketching while I'm here, and with this in mind, packed some coloured pencils, secreted in the bottom draw of my study.
While I was searching for an only sketch pad with unused sheets in it, I looked at a file folder of drawing made twenty five years ago, before I became obsessed with digital photography. I was surprised to find how many drawings I did, mostly in the years we were in Geneva, not only in Haute Savoie, but Greece and Ty Mawr convent. I'm certainly not tired of photography, but long to do something different, ring the changes a bit, and definitely develop better drawing technique. We'll see.
After supper, I watched another couple of episodes of 'Bordertown'. It's interesting in that it portrays the lead investigators in a serious crimes squad working across the Finnish Russian border as high functioning autistic, whose reasoning process is informed by his visual memory and attention to detail. It's very dark stuff, showing the really sordid side of organised crime and its dalliance with legitimate business.
At first I was puzzled by the manner of storytelling in this series, in which the portrayal of the dramatic conclusion was compressed into a series of video vignettes in the last few minutes with only glimpses of violence and happy reunions after a rescue. Interestingly, this minimises the melodramatic character of unfolding events and emphasises the story told of an investigation with an unusual team of investigators. It's the first time I've really noticed this in crimmies I've watched over recent years.
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