I’ve been thinking about your accident at Wrabness. Though I’m not by any means superstitious, it does seem to be an omen of my own accident. The place, the people, us going to Colchester Hospital… It’s all just the same. And I only had the beach hut for 3 years before the stroke!
You’d come to Frinton a few years before. That had been great. And I remember asking about your father and being told he had a market stall, picture framing I think. I had a very different view of him: bespectacled, thin and wiry, like Bruno Ganz. I suppose it was basically you grown up… Not at all accurate!
But then Wrabness – it happened to you in the first 20 minutes. And – as you say: ‘It is creepy about the hut… but there was even a horrible dog, a Rottweiler or something, barking at us when we first arrived. You had to tell the owner to keep it in check. All very tense…’
And I didn’t take any notice of (in horror movie terms) ‘the warning’.
So two years later, with the same 3 boys, it happened again, only even more radical this time…
And ‘Frances’, meanwhile, had anorexia…
And the thing is: I’d always LOVED Wrabness. Even before we lived in Mistley or had children, I used to fantasise about having one of the bigger huts there – the sleeping cabins.
That would have been my 90s fantasy: to sleep there, without electricity, come round early in the morning and swim in the ice-cold water… How Scandinavian of me…
Stroke of luck 