October 19

Happy holiday.
We will head to North Yorkshire for the week. The beaches will be empty, you can run for an hour without seeing anyone.
We will go to our favourite beach with Grandpa, make a fire and cook sausages.
You can watch the seals bobbing, just off the edge of the wave-cut platform. The sun is low in the sky at this time of the year. Sunsets are stunning.
My son gets some space, a feeling of the outdoors, freedom. We stay out too long and nearly get caught by a fast-rising tide. We have to scramble across the rocks to make it back before the wooden steps up the cliff are cut off.
It’s dark by the time we get back to the car. The lights from the farmhouse dotted along the coast shine out. In the distance the castle is silhouetted.
Collecting wood, starting the fire, a saucepan full of beans and sausages with red sauce in a bun. That’s the menu. Set in stone. We do it every time we go up there.
It’s much more fun in the autumn than in the height of summer. Nobody else around, you have to wrap up warm. Gloves and a hat. It feels more like an adventure. The sea can be choppy, stormy. The puffins have gone but you still get gannets, guillemots and the cormorants sitting stately on the rocks beyond the breaking waves.
I love to find my son some space.
He’s only six, he doesn’t need to be hemmed in all the time. It’s not healthy.
Nowadays you couldn’t risk letting him go out all day to play in the woods with his friends. Something might happen to them. He is restricted and you feel restricted yourself, as a parent.
You always have to be there, watching. Dropping off and picking up. Can’t risk anything.
You can store one million of your very favourite tunes on an Ipod and receive 1,000 different channels from 100 different countries on your television.
You can watch 24-hour news on your mobile phone while downloading clips of the football match you missed on your wifi laptop.
But you can’t leave your kid to play by himself at the park.