No return visit to the UK would be complete without calling in to Scarborough on the north-east coast. I lived here for nine years, from early 1993 to the end of 2001. During that time, in partnership with my mate Bruce, we owned and operated Scarborough Jet Skiing, a jet ski hire, sales and repair business, for five fantastic summer seasons.
I look back on those years as some of the most fun-filled days of my life, and often have mixed emotions when I come back to town. I love the place, and have some great friends here, but I also feel slightly melancholy about times gone by.
However, this weekend has been very entertaining, and as is often the case when I come back here, has been filled with some unusual experiences.
Bruce, who I have always credited as the original ideas-man behind the “ALife4Sale” project, along with his partner Lizzie and son Tyler, are moving out to the counrty to a small farm they now have out there. Right next door, Lizzie’s brother John has just built an enormous chicken shed where he is rearing free-range chickens, and now produces over 7,000 eggs a day! I have never seen so many chickens in one place in my life!
We had very fresh eggs the next morning for breakfast. The egg in the middle of the three pictured is a normal sized egg from the shops. The smaller one on the left is what most of John’s chickens are currently producing, as they are just getting started, but the one on the right was a surprise find from one of the young chickens – that can’t have been easy to produce! It tasted great.
On Sunday afternoon I went to meet Nicky, and her husband Craig, who works as a sound engineer at the grand old Victorian-era Spa Theatre on the seafront. Nicky had contacted me through the website, and had also supported my fundraising goal by buying a photo of the whales I saw in Japan. I thought it would be fun to deliver the photo in person, and got a behind-the-scenes tour of the theatre, which was fascinating. I got to have a bit of a play with the fabulously high-tech sound an light mixing desks.
Yesterday I headed out into the country with my friend Alan, in his old battered Morris Traveller, along with Mal, and Blue, Alan’s extremely eccentric and amusing English Bull Terrier. We visited a couple of lovely country pubs before heading back into town to finish the evening.
And so this morning I am heading back to mum’s in Darlington for a few more relaxing days, before heading back south at the end of the week, and an atempt at a particularly scary goal in a field somewhere near Stamford! Fingers crossed!
Thanks to all my friends in Whitby and Scarborough for a fantastic weekend, it’s a shame it was such a flying visit. See you all again next year, I hope.
