A Sandy Beach, Hailstones and Accidental Curtain Shopping: Gullane

“Why don’t we go to Gullane? It’s a good sunny day and we haven’t taken Keira [the dog] down there for a while”. That’s how it all started and where fate was tempted.

Gullane is a town just down the coast from Edinburgh, in East Lothian. It’s one of the towns which, I think we can quite safely say, people live in just so they can say “oh no, daaahhhhling, we’ve moved to the country; but we can be in town in half an hour”. There is, of course, absolutely nothing wrong with this, Gullane is a lovely little town. With (at least) two golf courses (one of which hosts the Open every once in a while), a couple of pubs and a big beach it has pretty much everything needed to become the perfect country suburb. If I didn’t want to live in the city and wanted a ‘little place in the country’, I’d seriously consider living there.

So I said yes, I’d come play frisbee with the dog on the beach and blow my lethargy away. It was all going so well until we got to Musselburgh. Then we passed a curtain shop. By way of background, our living room is about to get decorated, so all interiors shops that don’t look like they’ll laugh at your ideas or proposed spending levels must be visited. There then followed a twenty minute detour looking at the endless variety of styles, colours and materials on offer. I, Of course, was my usual helpful self and pointed out everything that would most certainly not be suitable.

From here it looked like the afternoon could only improve. We got to the beach and everything was going well – the dog was even behaving. The golden sand stretches out about a mile in each direction and the tide was pretty far out. There were leaps, bounds and cartoon-style skid-stops, clouds of sand flying through the air and howls of desperation if the frisbee wasn’t sent skyward quickly enough for Madam’s liking (yep, pretty much every time). Then it all went rather dark and it started raining. And when I say rain, I really mean virtually torrential, horizontal rain. Joy. We walked sullenly on, beaches being considerably less fun in the rain and the rain’s direction meaning that we’d get it full on in the face if we turned around. It had come across the water pretty quickly, so we reasoned that it wouldn’t last long. We were right, the rain stopped pretty quickly. Sadly it was replaced with similarly horizontal hail stones. I don’t think anyone’s told the weather that it’s April.

True to the regular form of the lovely Scottish weather, the hail was (after a fashion) replaced by the sun. And in fact by the time we had got most of the way back along the beach we were half dry. Well, most of us – the dog had decided that she desperately wanted a bit of seaweed out of the middle of one rock pool and had seriously mis-judged the depth of another that she walked/swam through. We got back to where we’d started and had not gone too much further along when we looked over to Fife and noticed that rather a lot of it had been obscured by the next front coming in. And so we hastily called it a day.

All things considered it wasn’t a bad little afternoon out (save for the curtain shopping); Gullane is a lovely little place and somewhere that certainly merits a little more exploration as I hear it has a few nice eateries. Perhaps we’ll go back in the summer when the chances of hail are slightly lower, although whenever we go I feel the dog will end up coming back (more than a little wet and sandy) in the boot and spending the evening crashed out on the floor, absolutely exhausted. And she wasn’t the only one, although I was at least saved the indignity of coming back boot-class.

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Cr