We went to Portishead today – I know I’ve written about this small town on the Severn estuary, less than a dozen miles south-west of Bristol before, but it’s such an interesting place, I’m waffling on about it again. It was a miserable rainy day and we wanted to do something, so we headed up the M5 and before long found a parking place in a car park just off the High Street. It was heading towards lunch time and as it was beginning to rain in a miserable way we went straight to our now favourite place, Coffi Lab. It’s a dog friendly café which serves excellent coffee, sandwiches, croffins (cross between a croissant and a muffin and delicious) and other cakes.
We found a seat by the window and enjoyed our lunch, watching people passing by, putting up umbrellas and hoods and taking them down as the rain tried to decide whether it was serious or not. Toasted sandwich and salad bowl consumed we left Coffi Lab and dandered up the High Street, relieved it was now only spitting. There was a bookshop-shaped magnetic force which drew me across the zebra crossing and into Max Minerva books. I promised daughter I was only going to look, but somehow I accidentally bought ‘A Flat Place’ by Noreen Masud. I bought it because the blurb engaged me on several levels, here’s what Robert MacFarlane, author of ‘The Old Ways’, wrote
Flat lands are overlooked, the bearers of our inattention. Moors, deserts, floodplains, fens alike have too often been effaced to the point of invisibility. In ‘A Flat Place’ Noreen Masud makes brilliantly good this lack; her book fathoms the depths of such landscapes, and their curious abilities to archive and erase, to unsettle and to console. In her prose, terrains of the spirit and the earth begin to slip over one another, like acetate sheets seeking a match. Sharply, subtly and very movingly, Masud thinks with places, seeking as she does to find a way back into, and then out of, the traumas of her early life.
Book bought, we wandered back down the High Street – I did stray into a shoe shop, but luckily none appealed too me so we went back to the car.
It was such a miserable day, we went into B&Q the home improvement store (founded by Richard Block & David Quale in 1969) because I want to redecorate various rooms at home and need to choose some paint and think about various improvements we need to make to our house. Full of ideas and some colour charts, we next went to a supermarket to buy some groceries, before heading home, windscreen wipers still operating.
It was a very simple day, but a very pleasant day! My featured image was taken in May last year, hence the beautiful weather!
Lois Elsden 