Rainy Days And Mondays (And Sundays. And Tuesdays)

Just a quick post to say I went for a short holiday and now I'm back! On Sunday morning Mrs Bhagpuss and I hopped in the car and drove down to the edge of Dartmoor, about a hundred or so miles away. We stayed in Buckfastleigh and visited Buckfast Abbey, which I highly recommend. The gardens and the stained glass are both well worth seeing and the whole thing is free, something incredibly rare in the tourist traps of the South West. Well done, monks!

On Monday we drove across Dartmoor, visited several small towns and villages, then spent the night in Boscastle, a lovely seaside town that was all but demolished in a flood fifteen years ago. There's a marker in the main street showing how high the waters reached. It was two feet over my head.

This morning we took a look at Tintagel, where King Arthur was supposedly conceived (as in where his parents did the deed, although it might just as well mean where someone made him up, since there seems to be precious little evidence he ever existed). Then we came back very slowly along the Devon and Somerset coastline, visiting a couple of Victorian and Edwardian seaside resorts, one of which, Lynmouth, was also destroyed by a flash flood in 1952. We hadn't planned on a tour of deluge disasters but synchronicity will have its way.

We were exceptionally lucky with the weather, ourselves. Plenty of sunshine and we dodged almost all the rain, which was heavy and plentiful but only when we were driving between stops.

I had planned to post something before I went away to explain why I'd finally broken my 66-day unbroken posting record but in the end I didn't find the time on Sunday morning. I took my laptop with me, thinking I'd probably get a post or two in when we were pinned down in our room by the rain but that never happened. In the end I never even took the laptop out of its bag.

My return-to-work day is the 21st of October, at which point I would expect to go back to my old regime of three or four posts a week but until then I hope to bang something out every day. My post count for the year currently stands at 195, a mere two posts behind my all-time record of 197, which I managed in each of the first two full years of the blog.

This year is going to smash that. Apparently all you need to do to break your own posting record is to be seriously ill and spend half the year off work, sick. Who knew?