Kites and seashells

It's been holiday week, and (for perhaps the first time this year) I feel properly relaxed - almost too relaxed to type. No doubt my usual spikiness will resume shortly, when I am once again full of caffeine and bile - a couple of hours back at work should do it - but for now I feel pleasantly calm and eased, which is surely what holidays are meant to make you feel.
And we have enjoyed a 'proper' traditional family holiday on the Northwest UK coast, like the ones you pretend to remember from your childhood: beaches, sandcastles, ice cream, fish and chips, wet swimming costumes, picnics, and the constant threat of imminent rain.
I even flew a kite. I have not flown a kite for at least 20 years. My enduring memory of the holiday - and Nini's too - will be the hours we spent on the beach that afternoon, watching a naked Amelie (all her clothes too wet to wear after plunging into the surf) running up and down shrieking trying make the kite fly, with a circle of wet sand on each cheek of her bottom, while Neve giggled watching her and tried to eat seashells.
They are both too young to remember that afternoon when they grow up, but I will never forget it: the bright red kite against the blue sky and the yellow sand, the sun on my face and their complete innocent delight at it all. It was a day you want to bottle up and carry home with you....
For the record, we never did make it to the pencil museum (see previous post), but a check online shows that:
a) They have neither the biggest pencil in the world, or the second biggest pencil in the world, or the biggest coloured pencil in the world, or even the longest pencil in the world - but they do have the longest coloured pencil in the world. It is, in fairness, quite a big pencil - nearly 8 metres - but not what I has hoping for: I was expecting something so large that it showed up on OS maps...
b) It is neither red, nor blue. It is yellow. For the record that would have been my third guess...
c) I would have hated it. No offence is intended to the good people at Derwent, but I have now seen a map of the museum, and can say with absolute certainty that I'm not even remotely interested in exhibits like "The pencil registry", "Packaging of yesteryear" or "Examples of old machinery". But I have to caveat that by saying that I am a reknowned joyless husk of a man, and my wife - who is a better human being than me in almost every way imaginable - would almost certainly have loved it...