Signalling a new approach to life, Toni has voiced the aim of getting up each day at 8.30 am and going to the beach and walking for an hour.

Allowing for ablutions this actually took place today, starting at about 9.  I don’t of course “do” walking.  I feel that the good lord has gone out of his way to encourage his favourite creation to invent so many forms of transport which are so much easier than putting one foot in front of another that walking is actually a form of blasphemy.

I did a little light wallowing and listened to my Nano while taking the sun.

It is a fact (as noted by Ceri on one of his peregrinations) that early morning visitors to the beach tend to be of a “Senior” persuasion.  Groups of pensioners arrive, strip off and plunge gingerly into the welcoming sea.  Those not staunch enough in their approach to welcome the salutary effects of immersion walk the beach and do a form of beachcombing whose ends results are a little mystifying.

Shells are not difficult to find on our beach but our senior citizens seem to be looking for something more exotic than spending their time finding the two basic shell forms which we have in abundance.  They are looking for sea glass.

We now have a section of the coffee table devoted to this material and Toni has become a devotee of this form of Walking with a Purpose.  I too threw myself into this occupation by walking from my towel to the sea and picking up a few choice pieces (which were later rejected with contempt by Toni as inferior examples) on my walk back to resume my prone position.

Lunch was in an interesting new restaurant next to the Kafka whose name was a variant on the name of Castelldefels though I do not recall the exact form it took.  The meal was served by a very jolly man who apologised for the somewhat informal menu for which he endeavoured to compensate by tucking it expertly into the fold of my napkin in a post-modern cuisine sort of way!  At least he did it with a laugh which made his efforts acceptable.

Apart from a very ordinary pseudo-tiramisu to end the meal the other two courses were excellent and I would go again.

After the necessary siesta a little visit to Alcampo for things and stuff, but not the cut-price beach lounger that I was looking for.  Call me a self-indulgent aesthete, but a single towel on an uncomfortably undulating beach is not my idea of pleasure.  At all.

Horrifically, in Alcampo they are clearing the summer goods and putting out some things for Christmas!  I always think that it is bad enough when superstores start laying out the stationery in late July for school children for the September start of school, let alone bloody water features with snowmen!

As if we had willed it the Scumbags next-door kicked off on a monumental argument with the daughter (quelle surprise) screaming at her mother at the top of her voice and rapidly descending into noisy tearful imprecations.  The arrival of the Father promised more fireworks and he duly exploded with howls of rage but then, silence – rather than the throwing of items of domestic use which we have had in the past.  In the end it was a pale reflection of the cataclysmic pandemoniums that we have had in the past.

Tomorrow is Day 2 of the New Life of getting up at 8.30 am and swimming or walking.

We shall see.