Is this a carrot? she said,

Woke up this morning on an island in the Baltic. This is a small holiday village (in the best possible sense of the word) out of season. I love out of season. We have a sea view and can see the white horses cresting on a wonderfully rippling bluegreen. The sun is pelting down and a fresh breeze is moving white wisps rapidly across the blue. Driving all day and then taking a three hour ferry got us here at one in the morning under more stars than I have ever seen.
We are on almost the southernmost tip of Gotland which boasts more hours of sunshine than any other place in Sweden. Though I've heard other similar boasts from Koster, Abisko and Karlstad.

We have brought a pack of books; mine include study literature for work and The Loser by Thomas Bernhard. He is one of my favourite authors, if not my total favourite. I'm looking forward to it so much. We have left the backgammon board at home to portion our timewasting a bit and keep our voices down.

This place, Holmhällar, is known for its quiet, its atmosphere of untouched since the fifties, and it mentions with glee the lack of activities. There is walking in nature and that's it. Unspoiled.

I just saw a person. A grey haired woman living in the cottage next door. She had gone out to get some reception on her mobile phone, or to talk in peace. She went in again.

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Is this a carrot? she said, bending down to pick an orange thing off the pebble beach. In fact it was a fossil and there were more of them, a pocketful of surprising stone turds with a white vertebral hub that spread out crystalline threads like praline cracknell. Praline cracknel - I haven't seen that for years, it used to be one of my favourite sweets.
Being a limestone place, there are strange shaped columns of stone worn away by time and called raukar, (rau as in wow), but also giant bowls and great henry moores. Pix maybe coming up soon.