Today Sheila and I did a longish beach walk at North Berwick - around 6 miles. Blue skies and unbroken sunshine for several hours, later fluffy clouds reflecting on a blue sea, a chain of islands offshore and in the distance a humungous container ship. As we walked we saw a cormorant diving, a golden plover running and olympic sprint, yellow wagtails bouncing across the rocks, oyster catchers sounding like feathered smoke alarms when we got too near, and several small shore flowers we need to look up in the book.
Not only so. But North Berwick has a string of charity shops a couple of which have good second-hand book sections. I celebrated a good day by spending four pounds on John Batchelor's biography of John Ruskin. This strange, opinionated, erudite, humane social reformer, art critic and writer of some of the best prose in the English language, has fascinated me ever since I discovered a book of excerpts from his writing. I'll make a space to read this when I'm away on a reading week soon.
If sabbatical is about getting in touch with the world around then today made for good sabbaticaling.
Glad the sabbaticaling is going well. When are you sabatticaling in Crail?
Posted by: Margaret | October 08, 2008 at 10:57 PM