moody skies at Belhaven
Belhaven beach, 7 June
Whenever I have a few days at home, days where we’re not escaping down the coast, I always end up searching for properties that are closer to our walks, to our places, or, if there’s nothing local, I’ll look further afield at locations that might offer a lifestyle that’s a better fit with who we are. With who I am. Nothing about me is meant to live in a town. I crave quiet. I crave being able to look outside without seeing neighbours, and to step outside without seeing people. I guess Raf and I are very similar in this. I may not shout the way he does, but I bristle internally.
I should probably say that we have neither the budget nor the will to take on a project, and moving usually means a project if you’re looking for something affordable. Years ago, yes, but not now. When we moved to our current home I had a head filled with ideas and plans and hopes: a new kitchen, a redesigned shower room, replacing the conservatory (our dining space) with a well-insulated extension that wouldn’t overheat the house in summer and chill it in winter. I’d spent years interviewing people about their renovation and redesign projects for work, so nothing about this felt strange or out of sync with taking on an older house that needed some upgrading. We could do this, I thought.
Only it turned out that we couldn’t. It turned out that this move and the chapter we were entering was going to be tougher than expected. We’d moved, reluctantly, to the town I grew up in, a place full of memories and associations, and most of them were negative. I quickly realised that I didn't want to nest, to redesign, to create a home here. When we walked at John Muir Country Park, it felt like home. When I stood on top of the dunes at Yellowcraig, gazing out towards The Lamb and Craigleith and Bass Rock, it felt like home. I was home. The house we live in, and the town we live in, did not feel like home to me on any level.
I remember a colleague at the time saying that it had taken her three years to grow to like the house that she had moved to with her family. Three years is a long time to wait, I’d thought. And now seven years have passed since we moved here, and nothing has changed. I deeply appreciate having this roof over over heads, and I’m so glad that the lads felt so at home living here. Yes, wherever they were was home. My best and my absolute worst memories of this house are with them. Whenever we do move, I’ll carry those with me: Harris tucked up in his sofa nook, paws in the air, completely content; Bracken warbling and tap dancing beside the dining table as his Dad prepared veggies for dinner.
Yes, I’ll carry all of these memories of these precious years together. Of our family.
But I long to be somewhere else.
While a remote life is the dream, it isn’t feasible for the next few years. Last week a property popped up on the market close to this place, within walking distance of this beach at Belhaven, and it got my head whirring. The property isn’t right for us, and we can’t move at the moment for a number of reasons, but it got my head whirring anyway. In my previous post I wrote about how my head space had deteriorated after just days away from our familiar, grounding places. I wrote the post on day thirteen, but I was feeling this long before we’d reached that point, and I’ve been thinking about this. That’s fast. There’s a fundamental unhappiness living in this town and carrying the shadows of those memories of a past life. What might life feel like if those shadows could be shaken free?
This walk is from early June, and an evening when we were trying our best to avoid people. We’d arrived at John Muir Country Park and there must have been people around, perhaps some kids setting out to camp. I can’t remember now, but we walked across the salt marshes instead, away from the woods, and arrived on the beach to these wide, expansive views at low tide. It was an evening where the light had been dimmed, low clouds offering a palette of muted blues and grey tones in the sky, and in the cloud reflections hanging in the pools of water left behind by the receding tide. An unshowy sky, but I was enjoying these layers, and while you can’t see him, Raf was enjoying running free across the sand, splashing along the shore, completely at home here, in this place.
Belhaven beach, East Lothian, 7 June 2025.
#belhaven #eastlothian #coast #scotland
