You can instantly tell that the holidays are over: the wind dropped and the sun came out; blue skies, fluffy white clouds and mermaids frolicking on the rocks, no doubt. Last week and before, during the morning twenty or thirty people would be gathered around outside, dropping in for breakfast goods or going in next door to have it made for them. We now have a few groups of five or so milling about. It is a new world.

It is a world where there is more opportunity to have a little fun to make the day run along in a more delightful way. Well, it does for the grumpy shopkeeper; the customer may feel differently. For example, a lady approached the counter with a punnet of mushrooms that she did not expect to find in our little backwater store. Delighted though she was, she felt it necessary to query why they had to come from Poland. Eager not to stray into such a political territory I told her that they were not, in fact, from Poland. The signage indicated that there were our very finest mushrooms and I had taken care to ensure that each individual mushroom looked its best. The label merely indicated that they had polish.

We move swiftly along to an errant shower of rain that swept through The Cove in the middle of the morning, just as things were beginning to bump along quite nicely. I was blissfully unaware of it until a bunch of very wet people pressed into the shop. The shower, while brief, had been unexpectedly heavy and had caught a number of people out. It produced an unexpected flurry of activity in the shop which dissipated as quickly as it had formed.

It was not the last flurry of activity but all the others we had during the day were not rain induced. It was nowhere near as busy as the same time last week, even in poorer weather, but for an ‘out of season’ day, it was reasonably respectable. What was not respectable was the level of pasty sales (sorry, MS) that have dropped through the floor. I have noted before just how difficult the transition to quiet is and pasty ordering is one of the hardest things to achieve.

Over the last six weeks or so ordering 50 to 60 pasties a day is normal. Any less and the world comes to an end. It is very hard to switch to ten pasties a day and be convinced that it will not. With minimum ordering, the pasties now need to be ordered every other day, which makes it even harder.

With customer visits turning sporadic, I was able to have a good geek at the big beach during the day. Midway into the afternoon, under a bright sky, the beach, still showing off its spring tide sandbars, was busy at both top and bottom. There was a small host of paddlers, swimmers and surfers roughly in the middle, doing what those respective parties do in the water. Up by the dunes, quite a few more than yesterday, was a sprawling collection of camps stretching out as far as The Valley. Down the middle of the beach was dotted with several perambulators widely dispersed. It was certainly that sort of day.

Business petered out after about four o’clock. By five o’clock our end of The Cove had gone peculiarly quiet. The only thing to shatter the silence apart from the occasional passing car or motorcycle was the incessant cry of a young herring gull. I do not know if it was a distress call, but it was certainly distressing me. It has been having a go for the best part of a week. Because only my right false ear is operational it has given the effect that the squeak from coming from one of the chillers at the far end of the shop. It was only a chance conversation this morning that confirmed it was the gull. If it carries on, it will be more than bleddy distressed.

Part of the silence was the absence of any waves breaking on the rocks or the shore. We had gone from waves breaking over the Harbour all 24 hours ago to hardly a ripple on the bay at all. There must have been some underlying swell still because there were some surfers having a good time on the waves breaking slightly offshore on the main beach. There were also a few more, lower in the tide, around the sandbars. A couple of hours before high water, they had nearly all disappeared.

We all sat down to tea, a roast dinner at that, for the first time in six weeks. Very pleasant it was too as we gazed out over the bay. There were still a couple of wall jumpers, stalwart until the end and, the Missus noticed, two boarders paddling out to the northwest. As we watched they kept going and then going some more. Probably nothing to it as they looked confident, but I sent a message out on the crew gossip page for an eye to be kept. 

They eventually stopped around a quarter mile off the north of Cowloe and started handlining. Slowly, they drifted back into the bay when I called off the watch. It did not look like they had caught anything which was an awful lot of effort for an empty dinner plate.

The Missus went back up to The Farm after she had taken Mother home. She was back again before half past eight as the light was failing and it can be a bit spooky up there in the gloom. It underlines the shortening of the days, and the end of season will be on us before we know it. It also meant I did not have to take the girls around last thing, so I took myself off to bed instead.