Beautiful sea

This beautiful beach here is in Cornwall and it's where we are going (in a couple of weeks time) to have three amazing days walking on the beach, relaxing, having intimate dinners, I cannot wait! Work is so stressful for both of us that sometimes we just need to get away and my choice will always include the sea. The sea relaxes me and makes me feel small and makes my problems shrink in size. Just the smell of the sea drives me crazy with longing - I just fool myself I can live without it most days here in London :)

Since I was a little girl my parents always took us to the beach and so I grew up spending up to 3 months in the summer, every single year. This was thanks to my grandfather that bought a house in Sardinia, a lovely italian island, many many years ago when it was still cheap, and so we could go there anytime and for long periods of time.

Life in Sardinia as a young girl was simple: jump out of bed, hurry up with breakfast (not too much breakfast - you would not want to wait too long before going in the sea) then rush off to the beach ahead of our parents (the beach was relatively close and the village very safe for our parents to trust us). We would spend all day there, eating italian bread with mozzarella and tomatoes for lunch, and spending every possible minute in the water. At 8pm (or as late as possible) we would go back home, tanned, full of sand and tired from the day and we couldn't wait to do it all again the next day. Shower, dinner and then bed.

As a young teenager, life by the beach slightly changed, suddenly I was sleeping longer in the mornings and arriving at the beach fashionably late like 11-12pm, to join friends there. My summer friends were special friends. We would only see each other during the summer months and every year we would all look forward to meet again, we came from all different cities in Italy and it was great to spend time with them. With them I discovered my first juke box (the song I loved to play again and again was 'Paradise City' by Guns & Roses), my first sip of an alcoholic drink
(I hated it, it was Cointreau!), my first crush and my first very best friend.
At this point I would spend very little time with my parents and my sister, and by far the only time we would spend together was dinner, as I was always rushing out after, to meet my friends down at the harbour for ice creams and gossip.

There I had my first ever kiss with my first ever boyfriend at 14 (a keyboard player from Switzerland!), and my first clubbing experience. And I could go on and on about my first experiences there, there are many and all my memories are tinged with nostalgia of the place that I could really call home. More than my own home in Rome.

Years went by, friends grew up and stopped coming, couples would form and reform, then I started coming with my steady serious boyfriends from the city, mainly to show them my home and what I was all about.

Somehow I never managed to take my husband there, my mum was always renting the house in the summer months, and we always chose to go away to different places.

I feel sad as now the house is sold, the only place I could call home, and the last time I was there, it was 5 years ago. I am not angry with my mum, she had to do what she had to do, she couldn't keep up with it anymore, it was an old house and she would have needed lots of money to refurbish it.

That's why, wherever I go, I always look for the sea, hoping that the smell has the strength to take me back home, if only for a few moments.