Let’s do this together

Ahhh the refreshing smell of salt in the sea air, the wind in my hair… and the clank of wine bottles being carried gingerly from the car to the local bottle bank.

I’m just back from a wild and windy weekend in Lyme Regis, Dorset, with my best friend Ali. That’s wild and windy indoors judging by the pile of empties and food wrappers we had to take home with us, while the weather outside remained sunny and mild.

Mother-of-whippets decided to leave the idiots at home or we’d have spent the weekend calling out the search and rescue coastguard helicopters to have them plucked off the vertiginous cliffs. Or saving the fishermen from going to sea with the world’s most useless accidental stowaways.

In fact we often wonder which of our dogs would last the longest in the wild. I reckon Bozza could last an entire day as he’d happily eat chewing gum and ciggie butts. While I give the whippets, Jazz and Sanna, about five minutes before they ran headlong into a brick wall.

Instead it was just me and Ali and Boris – the dog being the only responsible adult on the trip – and a weekend of bracing sea walks, literary chats by the fire about books (that we fully intend reading one day), and home-cooked comfort dinners in our “borrowed” cliff-top cottage overlooking the town.

But I knew things were going to go wrong when I realised I’d packed the car with one small bag of food, and two huge boxes of booze and crisps. “Is that just for you?” cackled Ali, as I picked her up. I looked in the back, and replied: “Hmmm… you may be right. We better stop at Majestic and stock up.”

So our weekend turned from classy to “crack open the prosecco,” and hilariously chucking ourselves off the Cobb like the annoying Louisa in Austen’s Persuasion.

See? Told you we were literary…

Email me at siobhan.mcnally@mirror.co.uk or write to Community Corner, PO Box 791, Winchester SO23 3RP.