HOLIDAY SNAPS - Curating Your Holiday

Today, being our thirteenth Wedding Anniversary, we took ourselves off 'n' over the bleak moors to Whitby for the day. A place we know well and love. So a visit is often about touching base with a few favourite haunts, and seeing what is gone and what new arrivals it has. 

As is our habit, much of the day was spent stopping off to drink and eat. Breakfast at Sanders Yard, Coffee & Cornish Pudding at The Cornish Bakery, and a fine lunch at a new eatery the Pescado Lounge. It was a clear blue sky, gloriously sunny day, and Whitby was looking at its best. It is, like everywhere, showing signs of its high street deteriorating, as well as some interesting larger developments which seem generally to be catering for the slightly more well off visitor. 

Having an Instagram moment

The day we were there, a group of Japanese tourists were enthusiastically wandering around Whitby. One woman in a fuschia overcoat having herself filmed on her phone by a friend, walking down the middle of the road pretending to look either side of her at the architecture of retail decay. That she almost brought the traffic to a screeching halt seemed not to bother her in the least. She needed to curate her foreign holiday with an Instagram/TickTok moment. We caught her doing the same thing with equal enthusiasm all over Whitby, it was utterly barmy and quite eccentrically charming simultaneously.  

We had time left in the afternoon to zip up to Saltburn on Sea, to check out how that was fairing. The original indulgence of a late Victorian entrepreneur who'd prospered locally from the Industrial Revolution.  Saltburn should by rights not still be surviving, with its archetypal pier and funicular railway, the parades of shops with their wrought iron canopies and balconies. Today, it is an uneasy mixture of kiss me quick seaside, with surf shops and high end restaurants, interiors and giftwares. And each time we visit, can see its retail fortunes are wildly fluctuating. This time it seemed on a downward curve, veering away from high end and had developed some very ugly gaps in its teeth. But Saltburn itself, the sea and the pier are doing just fine.