When I was a kid we didn’t ‘go on holidays’. We ‘went to the seaside’. Small difference but concpetually world’s apart. The whole world apart in fact because ‘the seaside’ was in England. You could probably find one in Wales, even Scotland. But the real one was in the south of England. No-one accused me of being worldly at age 6. But in the 60s that’s what we did.

And ‘the seaside’ embraced lots of things. Ok, sea. That’s pretty much a given, obviously. Sand in various degrees of stoniness, depending where you were exactly. Dodgy weather. This was England. Shops selling buckets and spades and lilos and all manner of brightly coloured plastic to which children are drawn like moths to a light, like dogs to shit. Though dogs seldom (to my knowledge) nagged their daddy-dogs incessantly to be bought shit. Like I nagged for everything bright and plastic and inflatable.

Then there was the other essentials. Beach huts. People rent them for a week, a month, a season so that they can… well, in order to… hmmmm… to enable them to sit in front of them. Beach huts being too small to sleep in, sit in or anything really ‘in’ other than store chairs and stuff. And I always wanted a beach hut, even though I knew not why.

Then there were amusement arcades. Slot machines. As much a part of the English seaside as anchor tattoos, as fish’n’chips, as wearing swimming trunks and wellies and a Liverpool football shirt.

Ahhhhh, the memories.

Package holidays made ‘going abroad’ cheap and easy. Then Freddie Laker invented a new type of aeroplane that was cheap to fly on and the world shrank. Marbella was the new Margate; Benidorm the poor man’s Bournemouth. America beckoned, Australia was nearer (until you got on the plane when it suddenly returned to the end of the fucking world where it had always been). Christmases in Thailand, New Years in Cuba. Snorkelling in the Galapagos, summertime in Italy, France, Israel, because the weather’s always nice and you get to eat that foreign muck and realise although decidedly foreign, ‘muck’ it ain’t.

So I haven’t been back to the English seaside in 50 years.

Until yesterday.

(to be continued… that’s exciting)

A xxxx