Not Exactly Twiddling My Thumbs



A cheery picture taken at Hartlepool to get us on our way. More on that later



A few weeks ago I put up a post here saying that I had an uncluttered landscape around me. [http://walkinonnails.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/suddenly-theres-uncluttered-landscape.html] Three books in their post-production stage and all that. Well, it never pans out the way you expect it to. Here I am, five or six weeks later, still fussing around with final edits, agent packages and lists of possible publishers. Someone has to do it.

However, I do at least have time to get out and about before the clocks go back and crowd us in with darkness falling at five, then four and, on a bad day, three-thirty in the p.m. Last week I took two trips, one to the races at Redcar, where I managed a short stroll on the beach before getting down to business.

Redcar: not the most picturesque place on a damp autumn day, but at least you have room to yourself







Places like Redcar - depressed by the closure of the steel works, in decline ever since cheap holidays abroad became the norm - have to try harder than most, and I have to say I liked their giant sand-sculptures along the front. Not sure how long they'll last, mind.

 

The visit to Hartlepool - forever doomed to be remembered, by football fans of a certain age, as the home of England's worst football team - was to celebrate a friend's completion of her PhD. On an afternoon as bright as this, it seemed criminal not to stroll around the Battery and remember the bombardment by the German Navy in 1914.

This gun actually has nothing to do with the 1914 exchanges but was captured from the Russians at Sebastopol in 1854. Still...

While I try to complete after-care on the various projects that have kept me busy over the last year or so, the next project is already occupying desk space. I'll talk about that in a few days.

The Tees estuary