Palm Trees in Miniature at Babbcombe Model Village

Our first day in Torquay didn’t begin with paddling in the sea like I thought it would.

It began with a village. A really, really tiny village. But at the same time, it had everything a town would have had?

Enter Babbacombe Model Village, named for the area  district of Torquay, and I remember thinking I knew exactly what to expect. 

Everything would be in miniature and it would be like a little doll’s house. I’d walk around it in five minutes and get back to Summerdyne to play on the swings and listen to my Bananarama cassette.

I was eight years old. I had no idea what I was about to walk into.

It was the summer of 1989, and the whole of Britain was in the grip of a rare, relentless heatwave that felt almost Mediterranean. The south of England hadn’t seen decent rainfall for weeks. The grass was yellowed, scratchy and crisp. It wasn’t just a little bit burnt. It was scorched and dehydrated. I had never seen anything like it and rarely have in Scotland since then. 

And then there were the palm trees. Actual palm trees? I remember staring at them, slightly suspicious.

And then we entered the village. Except… it wasn’t a village. It was a world in miniature and it was the size of a village, spanning four acres. It took us ages to walk around the whole thing, and we spent half a day there. 

Everything was shrunk down and full of classic British humour - much of it involving female nudity.

Nice message to send to families with little girls… 

A football pitch… with a streaker.A nudist beach… which, at eight years old, was the funniest thing I had ever seen in my life. Schools. Theatres. Houses. Police stations. Hotels. Everything you would expect in a real town, just in miniature.

The closer you looked and the longer you spent, the more you noticed. You spotted things you weren’t meant to notice straight away. Little scenes tucked into corners, tiny stories playing out between buildings. It felt like the place was in on its own joke, and you had to be paying attention to catch it.

We went back the following year at night and everything was lit up. Tiny lights glowing in windows, shadows stretching across miniature streets, the whole place shifting into something softer, almost festive. It was interesting to see the place from a different angle. The surprise element was gone but the village took on another atmosphere.

I believe they still do the illuminated evenings in 2026. I bet it would look great in winter.

Looking back, I think that day stayed with me for a reason. It was my first non-caravan holiday and my first time staying at Summerdyne. I was discovering England properly for the first time - and what a gorgeous part of England to start off with.

Even if the palm trees did confuse me.

A Sweeter Life at The Corbyn Suites

I stepped into The Corbyn Suites and I felt like I’d levelled up in seconds. Everything felt esclusive and clean, carpeted in forest green and furnished in mahogany with gold detail. It was 1998, the summer I turned eighteen and I was impatient for womanhood. This felt like a step closer to it.

This was in Torquay, where I had spent every summer since I was eight, but The Corbyn Suites were a completely different world from Summerdyne. If Summerdyne was a haven, the Corbyn was an upgrade. Or at least, that’s how it felt at the time. Because by then, I wasn’t just looking for escape anymore. I was looking for elevation.

The Corbyn Suites didn’t have flat numbers. They had names. 

The Degas Suite. 

The Monet Suite. 

The Turner Suite. 

The Phillips Suite. 

Each one styled after an artist, complete with replicas of their work on the walls, as if you were stepping into a curated version of someone else’s taste.

We stayed in the Degas Suite first. My enduring memory is hiding in there from the rain. Every. Damn. Day. Rain tapping against the windows. Grey skies. Nights spent watching football, since it was too wet to go out, so we sat inside this carefully constructed version of “better” watching France win their first World Cup there, in a suite named after a French artist, which felt oddly fitting.

The Corbyn had things Summerdyne didn’t. Such as an indoor swimming pool nobody ever used. Magazines in reception nobody wanted to read. Cleaners you could request, for a fee that we never called on. A receptionist who never smiled. Wake-up calls we laughed about - who needs a wake up call on holiday?! There was a faint suggestion that this wasn’t just a holiday place, but somewhere people stayed on business trips, for longer stretches.

I remember the leather furniture in the Degas Suite was a bougie shade of green called “pampas” and I eventually discovered that it was the same in the Turner Suite and the Phillips Suite. There was a lift, because this wasn’t a place where anyone climbed stairs unless they had to. I’m sure a few people descended stairs with style though. Each apartment also had a Juliet balcony. You’d open the doors and there was the sea stretched out in front of you. Torbay glittered, even in the rain. I carry around in my purse, to this day, a small pebble I borrowed from the beach across the road from The Corbyn Suites. A good luck charm that I never want to part with - but I’ve told my husband I want the pebble returned to that beach after I die. 

I remember the constant sound of traffic, trains behind the apartments that shook the building, car horns always in the distance and the occasional siren.

It was anything but peaceful. But it looked impressive and at that point in my life, that mattered to me.

But the enduring memory was the smell. Lilies. Always lilies. The kind of sickening, heady scent that hits you the moment you walk in and never quite leaves your nostrils, even once you’ve left the building. I ended up quite liking the smell since it reminds me of bougie summer holiday apartments but my mother really struggled with it and reached for the ibuprofen on more than one occasion.

I didn’t go to the Corbyn looking for comfort. I went there looking for a feeling that things were improving and therefore I was improving. I wanted to feel like I was moving up in the world, even if all that had really changed was the postcode and the furniture. I felt rich there, like I had stepped into a life that was waiting for me to grow into it. But really? It was just a nice flat.

But something was missing.

There were no gardens. I didn’t wander down long paths at dusk. We had no spontaneous conversations with other families. We lost the sense of belonging to a shared, temporary little world. I missed the morning stroll to Circle K in Walnut Road and wandering to Cockington for cream tea.

(Not that I would have eaten one anyway. By then, I was deep in ARFID, quietly navigating food in my own complicated way.)

The Corbyn didn’t feel cosy. It presented itself and you either matched it… or you didn’t.

I visited for three summers in a row, my last visit being 2000. I left for what I thought would be the last time the week before I tuned twenty. But it wasn’t the end of my Corbyn Suites adventures. I went back years later in 2011 for my son’s first holiday when he was four months old. I think we stayed in the Turner Suite, though I wouldn’t swear to it. What I do remember is a photo of him sitting in an unforgiving leather armchair, scratch mitts on his tiny hands, cradle cap, eczema-rosy cheeks… laughing like the world had already decided to love him, which, to be fair, it had. 

That visit to The Corbyn Suites sits differently in my memory. It was less about proving anything and more about being there with people I love.

I never knew who owned the Corbyn Suites. I think that says everything. At Summerdyne, there were names, faces, and lives intertwined with the place. Jo and Derek and their family were part of the story. At the Corbyn Suites, there was only the image.

It didn’t know me and I didn’t know it. Nobody watched me grow up with each passing year and visit and I doubt anyone remembers I was even there. 

You can still find the Corbyn Suites now. They’re on Airbnb, part of the endless stream of places interchangeable travellers can dip into for a few days.

The Summerdyne Years

There was a place called Summerdyne. Situated in Torquay’s Greenway Road, an old Edwardian house carved into around ten apartments, with a life of its own tucked inside the walls. It might still be there now, under another name, its past folded neatly into estate agent listings and fresh coats of paint.

To me, it was never just a building. It was an escape hatch. From 1989 to 1997, we went every year, to different apartments, varying versions of ourselves, but always the same place. Towards the end, when I got older, we split into two apartments with me, my sister, and her friend in one and my parents in another. That felt so grown up at the time as if I had quietly crossed into a another parallel version of my life without anyone announcing it.

Summerdyne itself was comfortable, but basic. It wasn’t glamorous and wasn’t trying to be. There was a tiny launderette the size of a garden shed, fully plumbed, a whiff of detergent omnipresent and faintly humming with the sound of other people’s knickers getting washed. There was also a payphone in the hallway behind a heavy echoey door that made everything feel official and slightly mysterious. Really? It was just the door that led to the owner’s flat.

The back garden was something else though. It was massive, almost endless. It had a badminton court with grass that scratched, picnic benches, swings, and a sandpit I was technically too old for but still secretly loved.

Actually, did it have a sandpit? Maybe I’m misremembering.

There was space to run, lie on the grass, and exist as a child without being watched too closely.

Behind the scenes were the lovely people who ran it all, Jo and Derek. Warm, friendly, always present, they were the kind of hosts who made a place feel safe and familial very naturally.

But this memory isn’t about the building itself, so much as who I was when I was there. In 1989, I arrived at Summerdyne at the end of a school year where I had spent far too much time alone. I’d fallen out with my best friend at the beginning of that year and drifted at the edges of everything for a long time after that. I discovered quickly what it felt like to be the girl nobody quite noticed.

It was the year I started writing. Because if I couldn’t have friends or live the life I wanted, I’d create beloved characters and happy endings.

No one stepped in or rearranged the world to make space for me. Nobody invited me to play with them and it was hard to break into already established groups. And there was the ever present shadow on my life created by a girl who used to be my most trusted friend and then treated me like I was less than nothing. So I created my own worlds where I was loved.

At Summerdyne, I wasn’t that girl. I didn’t have to be ignored or hated. I could, for a summer, be whoever I wanted to be. And I leaned into that feeling like it was the oxygen I was gasping for. I was simply existing without feeling alone or despised and it was so healing.

As the years moved on, people came and went from my social circle. life changed and I evolved. But nothing suddenly transformed me. I was always me. If anything, life became more complicated. By 1995 and 1996, it was heavy. The kind of years that leave emotional tattoos on you. Some would call them scars, but I don’t like that idea.

But every summer, there was Summerdyne, waiting like a reset button for my confidence.

It was the place where I could put my life down for a while and pretend, if I needed to, that things were different. I practiced being someone else until it started to feel possible.

Eventually, it ended. Jo and Derek moved to Alderney. My heart broke when we got their Christmas card in 1997 telling us the news, accompanied by a box of clotted cream, with a Channel Islands postmark as the proof. It was sold, broken into separate apartments, absorbed into something more modern, profitable and impersonal. Around the same time, our lives shifted too. We started going to places that were, on paper, “better.”

By 1998, I think I had started to outgrow Summerdyne anyway. It wasn’t that It had lost its magic. I just saw it differently. It wasn’t just an oasis in the desert anymore. It was also a reminder of why I needed an oasis. I was ready to embrace a new era of life when I didn’t want the memories.

Now, at 45, I think about it differently again. Part of me wants to go back and stand on the grass, just to see what it feels like now. Maybe lose a game of badminton? I’d sit at one of those picnic benches and let the past and present overlap for an hour or two.

But part of me thinks… maybe it belongs exactly where it is? 

A Trip To The Sleeping Warrior

Arran was a holiday that I always felt was the last trip of being a really wee lassie. I was there in 1987 for a very short holiday with my Gran, my Mum and Dad, and my sister. It was July, so right at the start of the holidays. There’s still joy in taking a trip even when you know you’re not going very far.

When you live in Ayrshire, days out to Arran should be more common than they are. It’s right there. You can see it all the time and yet, most of us don’t go that often. I’ve probably only been a handful of times in my life.

(Cue people butting in to tell me they go all the time - good for you!)

To get there, you take the ferry from Ardrossan. There’s not a lot going on in Ardrossan, if I’m being honest. It exists, in my mind at least, as a place you pass through on the way to somewhere else. It’s all very much geared around the ferry. You’ll find cars queuing, people waiting, that sense of people coming and going but rarely staying.

The ferry itself feels long. In reality, it’s about an hour but when you’re used to the Millport ferry like I am, which is over in ten minutes, an hour feels like a proper journey. It feels like you’re going somewhere important.

And then you arrive in Brodick, which at least in 1987, didn’t have a lot in it. It’s the main town on the island, but it still feels small and sleepy. I’ve always felt there’s more to it than I have ever seen - there must be.

Arran is often called “Scotland in miniature,” and it makes sense when you’re there. You’ve got hills, beaches, wee villages, and stretches of road where it feels like there’s nothing but you and the sheep.

They also call it the Sleeping Warrior. If you look at the outline of the island from the right angle, it looks like a person lying down. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

We took the car over, which was helpful, because the buses aren’t exactly frequent. So we drove around the island, just taking it in.

The west coast felt different from the east. I can’t really explain why. Just a different, wilder energy. I have a vague memory that there was a ferry from that side, possibly from Lochranza, over to the Mull of Kintyre. One of those things you remember without fully knowing if you’ve got it exactly right.

And then there’s Goatfell. You can see it from all over the island, just sitting there, waiting. I’ve always meant to climb it. Still haven’t. Maybe one day.

There’s also a beach called Cleats Shore. Rumour has it that it’s a nudist beach. I cannot confirm this, and at that age I definitely wasn’t investigating. But maybe that’s another thing on the bucket list…

The main thing I remember from that trip is Brodick Castle. As a wee lassie, it felt like a genuine magical castle. The kind that makes you feel like you’ve stepped into a fairy tale. I may have been partially inspired by it when I wrote Cherry Lips. It dates back centuries and ended up in the hands of the Dukes of Hamilton before becoming part of the National Trust for Scotland, but none of that mattered to me at the time. What mattered was how it felt which was big, romantic and slightly ethereal.

I remember a photo of me and my sister there with my Gran. It was one of those slightly faded, very 80s pictures taken on a 110mm camera that exists somewhere in a drawer.

I don’t remember much else. A picnic, a tearoom at the castle. Something simple. I wish my seven year old self had made notes. 

But the memories aren’t about what we did. They were more about being there and having my first trip on a ferry. There was also the feeling of being somewhere different enough to feel exciting but familiar enough to also feel like home.

What I do remember is the journey home because no 80s day out was complete without stopping for a chippy on the way back at the Chip Box in Stewarton. Nothing quite beats greasy paper, heat and the smell of vinegar. It’s that end of the day feeling where you’re tired but happy and already half back into your normal life. When it’s 8pm and your mum can’t be arsed cooking. When you fall asleep in the back of the car but your family know your usual order (Half chicken supper with fritters instead of chips and a pickled onion please) so you wake up a very happy wee lassie. 

The last time I had that order was the night I brought Luke home from hospital, fifteen years ago. It’s the smell and taste of coming home.

Haggerston Castle - Core Memories Made

Now turning my attention to a week when core memories were made at Haggerston Castle. It was my first time being away for my birthday in July 1988. I was turning eight.

First core memory: leaving for that holiday with £12 spending money and coming home with £20. Birthday money - obviously! And not only that, I’d spent quite a bit while I was there as well, so in my mind I was basically a financial genius and decided I would become an accountant when I grew up.

Things I spent my money on included a Now 12 double cassette, which I listened to for the entire holiday and absolutely loved. I still go back to it now. Some albums just stay with you.

And orange Choc Dips. Do you remember those? Short little breadsticks with a chocolate dip that had never been anywhere near actual cocoa. And for a brief moment in time, there was an orange version.

Absolutely incredible.

Gone now, along with salt and vinegar Quavers and Mint Feasts. A whole era of snacks just… vanished.

Haggerston Castle should have been about a three-hour drive from Ayrshire to near Berwick-upon-Tweed. But for some reason, it took all damn day. We left on a Saturday and came back on a Saturday and I know traffic’s busier at the weekend, but this felt like something else. Like maybe my dad got lost?

That was the first time it occurred to me that maybe my dad didn’t actually know everything. I think everyone has that moment.

As for my mum, she was miserable the entire week. She hated caravans. Still does to be fair. And she didn’t try to hide it. So while it didn’t ruin the holiday for me at eight years old, there was this constant undercurrent of “things will be better when we get home.”

Looking back, I recognise that feeling. I think I probably give off that same energy sometimes with my own son. Anxiety is no fun.

The caravan itself was decent but 1980s decent, not 2026 Haven-with-decking-and-double-doors decent. Two bedrooms with me and my sister in a tiny one with barely any space, but we each had a bed, so after Lairg when we were both squeezed into one bed, head to feet, that felt like luxury.

That holiday we became obsessed with Impulse body spray. My can was purple. I have no idea what it smelled like. Something synthetic probably that had never been within fifty miles of a real flower. My sister had a white one. These cans were £1.50 each. We thought we were the height of sophistication.

We also had what we called a ghetto blaster. That term might be offensive now? It was a long, thin, red radio cassette player that belonged to my sister. Mine was smaller and yellow with one tape deck while hers had two. So clearly, she was doing better in life than I was.

We played that Now 12 cassette constantly.Derek B, Sabrina, Wet Wet Wet, Hothouse Flowers, and then Iron Maiden’s Can I Play With Madness. Iron Maiden were not really my thing as a wee girl but we made it work. At the end of the song, my sister would say, “I’m sorry son, he’s not in,” like Madness was a child being asked to come out to play. My unsophisticated eight year old sense of humour found this absolutely hilarious.

To be fair, it’s still mildly amusing at forty-five.

Another core memory: the trampolines. Huge contraptions. Absolutely massive. Felt like they were too big for me. Or at least they felt that way because I was tiny? I’d love to go back and see if they’re actually as big as I remember.

We had a day out in Berwick-upon-Tweed and tried to use a Scottish pound note. And the reaction was like we’d just arrived from another planet. Even then, England had moved on to pound coins, and we were still using the wee green notes. I remember feeling genuinely nervous handing it over, not sure if it would even be accepted. What did I think was going to happen? At worst they would make me use a coin instead. That feeling has never really left me. To this day, I still make sure I’ve got Bank of England notes before I cross the border.

My birthday itself was a bit flat. I remember telling my mum I felt homesick and she told me I couldn’t be homesick because my family were with me. Which isn’t really how that works? 

We also had a day out at Bamburgh Castle. I remember it being cold and windy. I also remember looking out across the sea, seeing Lindisfarne in the distance and thinking it looked magical. Like anything could be happening over there. Only years later did I learn about the history of Lindisfarne and feel like I might have been onto something.

I also remember using an old Choc Dip cup to take some sand from the beach. I know. It’s a minor crime but I was eight and encouraged by parents who were not particularly environmentally conscious. That cup of sand sat on top of the kitchen cupboards for years afterwards, right up until the late 90s.

And then there’s the last day. One of those memories that isn’t at all funny now, but at the time felt like the height of comedy.

A woman outside the caravan, scratching her bum. Me and my sister watching through the window. My sister saying loudly “Are yer breeks bothering you, hen?”

We thought we were safe and invisible inside the caravan. 

We were not.

The single glazed windows were thin and she heard. She gave us an icy glare we completely deserved. We hit the floor, absolutely howling with laughter, trying to hide.

A lot of core memories were made that week along with a lot of giggles. Does it mean anything that I still remember the caravan number? Woodside 152. Or has my brain simply decided that for some reason, I should remember the number of a caravan I stayed in for a short week nearly 40 years ago?

Haggerston Castle was not just a place for me. It was a week of memorable moments, the end of a childhood era and the beginning of the “tween” era when memories get stronger and feelings get more complex. It was full of strange wee realisations, snacks that no longer exist, and the first time I was due to blow out birthday candles somewhere that wasn’t home.

Except… I didn’t even have a cake or candles. Nobody bothered to get me a cake. And so another realisation formed… and a hang-up around birthdays and ideas about my worth that survived to this day began.