Reading Aloud Passage

The beach was pretty empty at this hour, just Jackson and the congregation of early-morning dog-walkers. They acknowledged each other with a murmured ‘Morning’ or ‘Lovely morning’ (it was). The dogs were more enthusiastic, sniffing each other’s nether regions like connoisseurs. Thank God owners didn’t have to do that, Jackson thought.

He could see Whitby from here, two miles south along the beach, the skeleton of the Abbey standing on top of the cliff. The tide was definitely going out, he decided. The beach was clean and gleaming in the morning sun. Every morning was a promise, Jackson thought, and chided himself for sounding like a greetings card. No, not a card – it was something he had seen written in Penny Trotter’s shop, the Treasure Trove - on a sign, a painted wooden one. She had a lot of them, along the lines of Caution – Free Range Children and Count the Memories, not the Calories (a motto she lived by, if her waistline was anything to go by), not to mention the ubiquitous Keep Calm and Carry On, banal advice that particularly raised Jackson’s ire.

(Kate Atkinson, Big Sky, London, Transworld 2019, pp. 105-6)