A free woman again, I was making up for lost time.

My first assignation was with EF, a French engineer. We shared a white tandem ride along the East Lothian coast, comparing the beaches that we passed with others that we knew in France and the Outer Hebrides.

The most remarkable sight of our journey, however, was the most enormous seal. The size of a elephant, it pulled itself out of the water and lumbered up the shoreline to the settle in a sand dune for the afternoon.