Down by the seaside

It was the last week of the summer vacation, and we went to the coast down south. Actually, it's not very far south, just an hour driving south of Winterland.

Blackberries are growing wild by the roads, very nice to eat right off the bush. Blackberries don't grow in Winterland.

(I might use this as a definition; Winterland is the land north of the northermost blackberry bush.)

We had some nice and lazy days by the sea, swimming, jumping from cliffs (the kids, not me), fishing, or just racing around on the fjord in a small boat, just for fun.

Little boy caught a grasshopper and put it in a jar. He named it Roy and tried to teach it tricks. It turned out that Roy wasn't very willing to learn.

I've read some good books, of course. First, I read my every-summer-on-the-beach book; The Gambler by Dostoyevsky. It's about the 10th time I read it. Second, I read Boomerang by Tatiana de Rosnay. Good book, recommended.

Then I found this old book in a shelf; The Barble Bush by Charles Mergendahl. I had never heard of it before, but the text on the back cover made me curious; "2.5 million copies sold" (not necessarily a good sign), "mercy killing, adultry, seduction, insanity ... sordid ingredients". And the book wasn't bad, I think.

From time to time, I got tired of reading; I wanted to write. So, I got a notebook, and started to write a new novel. The notebook has pages labeled from A to Z (plus a couple of strange letters we're using here). Just for fun, I started a new chapter for every new heading-letter, and each chapter beginning with the same letter. I'm writing longhand, so I have to rewrite (and edit) everything later.

My new (so-called) novel is a story about two old men escaping from the nursery home, and their adventures as they travel northward. It's is kind of a road movie, except that it's a novel, and that they travel by train and ship rather than car. On their way, they summarize their different, but equally miserable lives and hope that their last journey will bring something exciting. I have no plot and no plan; we'll see where it ends.

Led Zeppelin? Yes, that's right. I borrowed the title of this post from a Led Zeppelin song on the Physical Graffiti album.

(I took the picture above on a nice and sunny day at the beach. The area along the coast is of great geological interest. The rocks were created by volcanic erruptions some 150 million years ago, and later carved and shaped by glaciers. It's nature's own art.)