Holiday

I took my soon-to-be-Dutch daughter to York and Bridlington for a few days last week. We had a fantastic time, ate well, drank champagne once, laughed almost all the time... It was a lovely break and one I shall look back on and cherish the memories when she has left.

I've always felt (like so many people) that I would love to live by the sea. Usually when I visit I paddle every day. This time, however, I found I didn't want to. We went ON the sea in a sailing boat and - possibly unadvisedly - a speedboat. But paddling didn't appeal this time, perhaps because the skies were mostly grey and the beaches very wet indeed.

One day of our week dawned glorious, and we took the opportunity to travel up to Whitby, taking in Filey and the wonderful Robin Hood's Bay, driving along the coast at Scarborough as we returned to our B&B. The East Coast is simply wonderful; there is an underlying poignancy about it because so much of it is doomed to disappear over the next century. Like Venice, there is a sense of Carpe Diem and a resulting joy at having been there before it's too late.

I never tire of being by the sea. I love Deepak Chopra's analogy of human life being like waves in the sea, constantly in motion and each wave visible for a short time but 'you can't put a wave in a bucket and take it home'. The energy of the sea is that same energy which fuels us all - which IS us all... if you put me under a strong enough microscope, all you would see would be the gaps inside the atoms of which I'm made. It is a salutory thought that everything solid seems to exist only because we have some prior agreement to see it that way.

In a week of riots, it struck me that this is how 'Society' is too. It functions normally only for as long as we agree it. This is why it is important that we refuse to let the media make us fearful for the future - we need to carry on believing in ourselves and our ability to live together. We need to agree to have a good and peaceful land, and not to let terror take over in any form.