I am greeting this blog like a long-lost friend at a reunion this evening: I have reason to celebrate, but it also feels a bit odd and like my past has possibly come to bite me on the bum.
It has been a really long time since my last post on Beach Hut Blogger – as many of you know – I began The Happy Hire Company as a result of the musings and deliberations on this blog page, you could say one made way for the other and then the new brain-child took over. Much like with siblings, The Happy Hire Company grew and stole all of the attention, whilst, like a jealous older-child, this blog sulked in the corner for a while.
Indeed, The Happy Hire Company has soaked up all of my beach hut thought-time and left nothing over for this little page.
I confess, I also began to shy away from sharing thoughts about life in general as it can feel a bit odd and lead to a stunting of ‘real-life’ conversations. Nothing throws a spanner in quite like, “yeah I read it in your blog.” Whistles. I did also FEEL like a bit of a spanner at times, things I shared one day would make me cringe the next. We don’t stay the same, we grow and change and written word has an unforgiving permanence. Much like Facebook, once you have the bastard thing, there’s no getting rid of what you’ve put out there, even if you delete it, it comes back and remembers it ALL!
Anyway, the long and the short of it is: blogging’s a bit weird, narcissistic and unnatural at times – but I hadn’t fully given up on why I first started it…
I wanted to write. I lost the urge to write on the blog for a catharsis, as I found time to launch myself into writing fiction, for real, and privately. There is a deliciousness to writing without anyone to read it, judge or criticise or simply ‘not get it.’ I can be free and explorative and enjoy (slightly wanky statement alert) the art of it all. The purpose, eventually, when I am bold enough, will be to send it to a proper literary agent and publisher-type person. Right now, I am back to waffling on this blog – but for very good reason!
WE made the shortlist for the Top 10 beach huts of the year 2017! Our little Forget-Me-Not, that started this, has made the shortlist! It is a national competition by Towergate Insurance in conjunction with The Sunday Times -and I am really proud to have made the cut as there are so many beautiful beach huts around, with owners that have fantastic stories.
The stories are the first thing I skip to, whilst you might think it’s the bunting and bric-brac that catches my attention, it’s the people in the huts that fascinate me.
People buy beach huts for lots of reasons. Rest assured these are not for the faint- hearted. They are expensive and make no logical sense at all! They are essentially over-priced sheds located in the place most likely on the globe to erode a shed. They need maintenance EVERY year almost, and are effectively grown-up Wendy Houses! So, for someone to part with hard-earned cash for this slightly-bonkers purchase there has to be a special reason. Plus, some have been in families for generations and this tells a story in itself.
Our story is documented in this blog in one of my early posts. It is also briefly outlined in the competiton link.
Let me tell you some of the story that hasn’t been told.
Nobody can prepare you for a baby, and definitely not two, now, we had a beautiful first year with my gorgeous Grace…
– but I did not expect to be in surgery, twice, with a very small baby. Grace was born requiring plastic surgery on her hands and feet under general anaesthetic, so they could remodel them to fit her shoes and for her to be able to grab and handle objects as she grew. Nobody would ever know to look at her beautiful hands and feet now that a small team of plastic surgeons had sculpted those perfect little bones at just a few months old.
Any parent who has left their crying child with an anaesthetist and done that bleakest of walks back to the ward will tell you that it is a devastating feeling that you never truly recover from. Now, Grace had relatively minor surgery compared with the life-saving surgeries performed on a daily basis by our completely amazing NHS and believe me when I say I am grateful daily – indeed many people around us don’t even know she had surgery as I have never desired to make more of it than it was. But. When I look back on those first blog posts and think of the time we bought that beach hut, after her first year with us, I can see a correlation that I can only see now that I am having this reunion and like a picture on a jigsaw puzzle, it can only be viewed once the pieces start to fit together and it is formed.
I was recovering from a deep wound of my baby being handled and injected and medicated and left by me, albeit I did it for her own good, and we have had a very easy time compared to many, but I know why I bought that hut, why, as it says in that blurb for the competition that I may have, in part, ‘struggled to settle into family life.’ I know why it took me a really long time to settle my soul and feel an inner peace I had previously known. I needed a beach hut to escape to because it was a place that I could gather myself and reflect and be as near to the sea as I could possibly get. The healing, restorative, cleansing sea. I wrote of waves crashing and peace dripping in my first blog posts. I now look back and can see what I was seeking and can gladly can say I found it. But not at a beach hut. The beach hut helped. It was a boost. Truly though, nothing actually heals pain externally of ourselves. No car, house, holiday, book or guru would work. I had and still do try and find answers outside of myself and this doesn’t work. It may temporarily – but it doesn’t really. The answer, as the oh-so-wise ‘Moana of Disney’ says, is inside me – and I realised that ‘still, small voice’ was just a bit louder by the sea that’s all.
Now, I know, I can access that still, small voice anywhere I want and I can access peace in any circumstances… N.B except the school-run and when the kids argue, as they are the last bastions of hell as all mothers know.
As for the reunion. Well, it’s felt quite nice. Remembering the boost the beach hut gave us, how far we’ve come as a little family -and for me as an individual -how one little, blue beach hut and a tentative blog, gave rise to a new career- of sorts – and an income- of sorts -but most importantly finding what makes my heart actually sing, which is what I set out to do and have found, though this will most likely come back and bite me on the bum at the next reunion.
We really shouldn’t leave it so long!!
You can vote for our beach hut to win the competition and – if I do -I get to meet that smooth operator, Phil Spencer, from Location, Location,Location, so please nominate us by clicking this link below and voting for ‘Forget-me-Not’ beach hut Eastcliff Walton-on-the-Naze…
https://www.towergateinsurance.co.uk/home-and-property-insurance/beach-hut-of-the-year
You can be in the middle of an emotional storm and if you can keep even a tiny sense of peace in that core of your being then you can weather it. When you don’t have peace everything is hard. I always think of the words of a W.B Yeats poem, “when peace comes dropping slow” . I can really relate to that line, many times, I have felt that lack of peace and it can be excruciating, drip, drip, in small droplets, like the agony of a leaking tap, when what you need is a gushing wave of it to cover you!
e hut, “by the sea all worries wash away” . That sealed the deal. I knew it was the tonic I needed.
We didn’t want it to end. So I went in search of a hut of our own. I asked around and rang numbers and discovered they cost a lot. Then we came across a wreck- 
thickest layer of grime I have ever seen and wire-wool a rusty old gas stove just to get a cuppa at the end of it- but what a cuppa!!!!
The Beach Hut Blog 