Skippy had her eye's tested yesterday. She's been complaining recently that the world looks spotty. 

It went something like this:

Optician: Right Skippy, can you explain to me what these spots you see look like and when you see them?

 Skippy: Well, yes. They look like spots. Everything I look at all the time is very dotty.

 Optician: Ok. Is there anything else you can tell me? Is it more dotty in the morning, or maybe are far away things more spotty?

Skippy: Well, there is something else - Mummy I've never told you this before - but sometimes when I look at my hand I can SEE RIGHT THROUGH IT. I'm not sure if I'm imagining it though...

Optician (coughing slightly): I think it's pretty safe to say that's in your imagination Skippy, unless you have superpowers, of course.

In my next life, can I just have a normal child, please?

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I mock, but I do so from the comfortable position

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The irony of being invited to a Dirt Devil promotion is not lost on me. Happen it's not irony at all - maybe the people from Dirt Devil were staging a slattern intervention. Or worse, they were concerned for the health and safety of my small child. After all not many children can survive with a mother who'd rather eat her own feet than clean the non-doorside of the bed. I make no apologies for my predilection for dusting my mantle with the cuff of my blouse, filing my paperwork in the oven, using the chickens to clean the kitchen floor and counting skittles as one of my five-a-day:

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I'm a child of the army. I struggle to feel that I belong anywhere. I don't have a hometown - a place where I, my family and childhood friends are from - where I can lay my hat and seek solace in familiarity. In the absence of this, I always seek asylum in Scarborough. 

I feel complete when in Scarborough. Perhaps it's the reassuring clinch of the morning sea frets or the crispness of the medicinal sea air. (Though these didn't do much good for poor Anne Bronte, who was sent to Scarborough to recover her health and dropped dead on the site of the Grand Hotel.)

More likely it's part Yorkshire DNA, a pinch of acquired nostalgia and a whole lot of love for this magnificent and, somewhat faded, regency town.  

I didn't spend much time in Scarborough as a child, but I listened for hours to my mother's tales of knickerbocker glories, the donkey bridge and being buried up to the neck by her two boisterous brothers.

I've flicked through the family albums so often that their memories are mine. I blink and I feel my teenage gran's hand happily in mine, as she sashays her smart nipped-in waist down the prom, holding her hat on with daintily gloved hand; I smell the bristly tweed and tobacco of my great-granddad's three piece suit, as I nestle my face on his shoulder to protect it from the harsh North Sea breeze; I hear the squabbling and laughter of four children in matching, home-knit, itchy jumpers, as they drop crab lines off the harbour wall. Scarborough is my inheritance and it is the heirloom that I ritually share with my child. 

Scarborough gives in spades. You don't believe me, do you? Here's what you're missing:

1) The Sea. The Sea. 

You may think it's a given that you see the sea at the seaside. Well you'd be wrong. I live within spitting distance of many of the North-west's seaside resorts (Blackpool, Southport, Morecombe). "I bet I see the sea first" is a game of inevitable failure, as you all ugly squint and confusedly point at the distant horizon, hoping that the murky grey line, covered with cloud is water. To prove it's the sea, you set off determinedly, walking two miles with bucket in hand, to drearily dangle your toes in the jelly-fished water. (Don't even get me started on Grange over Sands/GRASS).

The sea in Yorkshire is proper sea. When the tide is out you can still touch it, feel it, smell it. It's noisy and wild, forcing you and your possessions to dance the slow, seaside shuffle, as it steals the beach from beneath you. 

In Scarborough it's worth spending the day building elaborate sand castles, because you know the sea will come in and satisfyingly fill your zig-zag maze of moats and tunnels. (In Southport you would be too exhausted from the hike to the shore or to daunted by the prospect of digging a stream for a mile to even begin.)

Scarborough gives good sea. 

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I could pretend my truancy is a blockage: a writerly one, which sounds awfully grand, or a physical one, which sounds delightfully smutty. Or I could just be truthful and blame the messy business of living. The school holidays have been nine weeks of hard work. Nine whole weeks: summers were never that long in my day. Like parents across the nation, we've ineptly juggled work and childcare this long wet summer: farming her out to the far corners of the land - when we can - or watching her slowly climb the walls, bored at our Herculian efforts at home based entertainment and irritated by my craft OCD. 

 ("No, no, no. You need to remember to put the lid on when you've finished with the pen and then return it to the pen box in the scientific rainbow colour spectrum. Noooo, not like that, that's clearly the rainbow song order, which is obviously wrong. You are only seven, you're clearly not ready for pen responsibility. I'll tell you what, to cheer you up shall we alphabetise the sellotape drawer again?") 

This final week has been an olympic sprint to the back-to-school finish line. Nights have been spent hunched over my kitchen table sewing more name tags than a four foot person can possibly require, whilst silently cursing marrying a man with a long surname and not calling my child Bo. As ever I have been rescued by my parents - my mother, the only person to be trusted to sew pretty the enormous labels on the outside of her entire PE kit. (Yes, the outside. The utter bastards.) And my dad, who uncomplainingly rose to the challenge of redecorating her bedroom for the 'new year, new school, new you' drama I created as some eleventh hour prickly stick to beat myself with for not: having pre-ordered her school shoes in July (even though I knew there were only two styles permitted); or stockpiling those impossible to find - without recourse to rearing a sheep, taking Rumplestiltskin on the books and hand knitting until my fingers twitch - black knee length socks, which seemed to be just everywhere in June, only to have mythically vanished in September.

I am now more than three parts gin, with a disturbing whiff of ashtray and despair.  She is back at school. We can relax. 

Today I am firmly closing the door on summer and opening a window to autumn. Like her, my new year starts in September; with the buying of new stationery, unfurling of knee length socks and the lengthening of the nights. The girls in the coffee shop, fighting the autumn on-slaught with their persistent sleeveless top wearing and frightful flip-flop clack, should surrender. There is a delicious crisp in the air, only vaguely perceptible behind the unrelenting rain, but it's definitely there if you sniff hard enough. Trust me, I'm a witch about these things.

Instead of punishing and cruel January resolutions, the September new year is all about expectation, excitement and extravagance. Unlike this ungodly list, I'll stick to every single one of my autumn almanac:

1) Navy blue nail polish

2) Knee length socks in thick, childish wool

3) Flame coloured tweeds, velvets & silk layers

4) Stodgy crumbles and custard

5) Early nights, proper telly and log fires