On a blanket with my baby is where I'll be

ABC - Of Troon. 

B.  (there are a lot of B's)

Beach. 

South Beach to be precise; on a cold and wet and windy day. 

During the summer months, maybe from April til October, every morning the beach is scraped clean.  Not a string of seaweed can be found on it's golden sands. 

Come Mid-October, they give up and let the elements do their worst.   

I have to say apart from the minging orange foam - there was actually very little litter on the sands.  Maybe it had all blown away.   Any hoo. A

This beach.  Ah, the sights this beach has seen. 

Midnight parties after the Disco on a Saturday night in the summer.  Spontaneous drinks parties;  assignations; being abandoned on the beach by my mother at the age of 2, in a hole while she collected my sister from school, an old man flashing his bits to us, as we played in the dunes....

Walks on the sand;  laying in the sun listening to the waves wooshing;  Pootling along the tide line at sunset.  Eating Chinese on the prom wall after an afternoon drinking. 

Playing with the kids on the sand with buckets and spades. 

And As I was recounting to himself yesterday; there was a day when me and the Boy were down on the beach , when he was only little, maybe 18 months.  We got home in the car, and one of his little shoes was sitting on the roof of the car. The other one was gone. 

I fastened him back in the car and we trailed back along the road we had just driven, and just as we got to the car park at the beach, I spotted his little shoe, sitting in the middle of the cross road between the main street and the beach road. 

I was distraught; his wee shoe, all alone, middle of the road.  It hadn't been run over, it was sitting there perfect.   Cars were passing on all sides.  I pulled the car over to the side of the road, and stepped out. 

I held up my hands, and walked carefully over to the shoe, picked it up, burst into tears, and carried it like a precious jewel back to the car and climbed back in. 

And so it was that I welled up yesterday when I spotted a wee lonesome welly boot, sitting in the middle of the car park. 

All abandoned and alone.