12th June 2006
We got up the next day and I had a really long hot shower. Now you may not think that this is an important thing to mention, but the shower at my uncle’s house (and in many English houses) has no pressure and the smallest hot water tank I’ve ever seen. I just stood there letting the scalding water run over me, trying to wake myself up from the horror of a night I had just had. I dressed and packed up my stuff and went down to breakfast. I had a full English breakfast and at this place you could also get a full Irish Breakfast, blood sausage included, I passed on that one. I had made no secret to my parents that their snoring had be driving me mental and they asked me how I had slept. Well. They were in fits of laughter when I told them. “I can wait to get to Greece on my own, just so I can get a decent night’s sleep!” I said which only made my parents laugh harder at my apparent dramatics.
We paid our bills; I paid on plastic of course. I was determined not to let my horror of a night impact on my spending money for the day. We got in the car and drove to the record shop. Mum and I had made a deal. I had wanted to go to a nearby amusement park and they wanted to go to a place called Whitby. The deal was we would go to Whitby, and I would forfeit the amusement park as long as we got to visit the record shop, we had seen last night. So off we went. It was a really good shop. My favourite band is Oasis, and I got an Oasis Bootleg on Vinyl! I also bought a few other records and Mum bought Gary a book on the Rolling Stones, his favourite band.
We then got back in the car, after my parents had roused on me for spending so much money on records and drove to Whitby. I got my massive jumper that I had bought to keep warm in Rome and put it up against the window and feel asleep. When I woke up, we were in Whitby. Now, Mum told me that Whitby was where Count Dracula was supposed to have come ashore, and that parts of the movie “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” were filmed here. I told her that if she had told me that I probably would have forgone the record store. She was not impressed. We went out for a short boat ride and were shown the beach that Dracula was supposed to have landed on. The sea was quite bumpy, and I remember feeling a little sick. I did quite a bit of shopping, there were a few gothic shops here, I bought myself a spider web backpack with red neon spiders on it. Not my first spider purchase, I wonder if I’m developing a thing for spiders, I thought.
Our parking was about to expire, so we went back to the car and drove to Whitby Abbey. We paid to get in and went up to the building which the Germans had ruined during the war. I felt something at this place, I don’t know what exactly. Even though the sun was shining brightly and the grass was the greenest I had ever seen with little yellow buttercups dotted through it, people including school children running around, I felt a sort of eerie, unsettled calm about this place. I explored the Abbey and found a sarcophagus inset into the floor where maybe some steps were originally. There was only the one and I found this quite strange, it was of course empty, and I lay down in the stone coffin. I eventually got up and went around the back of the Abbey and found Dad who handed me a small bunch of buttercups, which I then made a small chain out of.