Letters from Newcastle

This is a very quick check in, written from the basement of a backpacker's, on a glorious, sunny day. I had to check my email this afternoon but so far I've spent a staggering 24 hours unplugged from the internet (which is more unnerving than I care to admit). And now I'm back here, sometimes. Never say I don't do anything for you people.

In a couple of minutes I'm going to buy a generic lemonade icy pole and wade into the ocean. It's warm here - my legs are bare for the first time in forever. My legs really get a short shift sometimes, constantly covered in stockings. I had some funny-looking scars for a couple of years and I guess I was a bit self-conscious about them, and then wearing stocking just became part of the routine, but this afternoon I took them off and rolled them up and put them in my handbag and now my petticoat is brushing against them in the wind and I'd forgotten how that felt. It's nice.

I think I might sit down in a park and read for a while, too. Take my shoes off, even. Just relax. I'm wearing the prettiest dress today, that I found in an op-shop, home-made, fits perfectly. We decided to hit up the op-shops before the hardocore TINA hipsters came and ravaged them, and in the second one we went to I saw this dress and fell in love. It's cream with green polka dots and piping and small puffed sleeves, which sounds not so appealing, actually, but it is. So it will please me aesthetically to go lie in a park in my pretty dress and wiggle my feet in the grass and just read.

Then tonight is ginger beer and readings; tomorrow panels and the ocean; and a long stretch of weekend filled by I don't know what. At the moment all I want to do is curl up like a lizard in the sunshine, so that perhaps. That and lots of lemonade icy poles.