The Ned Wood Archive

The news of today will be

the movies of tomorrow

Love

Surf’s up! Bournemouth was wonderful.  We’d planned it for weeks.  Our own personal celebration of each other and of our togetherness.  The two months we would be apart while I did my mapping in Derbyshire and Annie went home to Scotland seemed so big and so absolute, we had to make Bournemouth into something equally big to help us over it.

Just a trip to the seaside, that’s all it was.  But we were together.  So what happened?  We drove over in the morning in Chris’s car – his Herald that he lent us especially for the occasion.  We stopped somewhere on the A35 for a snack, just like we were a real couple, on a real holiday, even though its only like 30 miles from Southampton to Bournemouth.

And when we got there we just strolled around, had tea in a cafe, looked in shops, pretended we could afford to buy stuff, sometimes even pretended that we wanted to buy stuff, walked along the Prom, messed around in the pier, ran on the beach.  We sat talking in some gardens late into the evening, but some copper or park keeper or someone threw us out, so we drove back in the dark to Southampton and Annie’s house.  I tried to get Annie to kip on the beach again, but like she said, we would probably have been moved on again.  And anyways, it was only 30 odd miles back to Southampton.

But it was such a simple day full of scenes like from a film with something moving on the soundtrack like maybe Bowie singing ‘Kooks’ or the Ramones doing ‘Hey Little Girl’.  Scenes with me and Annie being a couple, me and Annie having our own private fun together which means absolutely nothing to you, but scenes that still mean so much to me that I get sunshine in the stomach every time I watch them or listen to the soundtrack.

And the next day we started packing up and on the Friday we loaded up our gear and took off for home and the big summer.