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Life's a beach
7:01 a.m. -- 2009-05-20

This is the other bit of the stuff that I wrote on the train, on the way back from Brighton.

One thing that I remember from childhood holidays to Hove/Brighton dates back to a time when, for some reason, it was just me and my dad. Sally and my mum were elsewhere for a few days, and we started the holiday without them. I recall dad persuading me that it would be great R&R to go out with a vacuum flask and a spare �mac�... and hunker down behind a groyne...

(You know what a groyne is, right? I have to ask, because there is some potential for amusing misunderstandings... from the Old French, groign meaning 'pig's snout' - but actually a low wall built out into the sea from a beach, to reduce erosion.)

Anyway, the plan was, basically, to excavate a spot, behind one of these handy windbreaks...

(Again, �windbreak� is much less amusing than it sounds... nothing to do with breaking wind.)

Where was I? Oh, yes: you dig away some of the pebbles (no sand on these beaches, so no sand castles) to make a space where you�ll be able to sit. And... watch the world go by.

I mean, that was it. You got out of the wind, and you... sat. Wearing your coat and covering your knees with the spare one.

So basically, if you did everything right, you wouldn�t be cold. A wise person might point out at this stage that we could have stayed indoors and not got cold or wet, but hey, you�re on holiday!

In adulthood, I thought I had got to the bottom of this. My folks weren�t exactly made of money, and parenting is an expensive business. You can�t necessarily spend the afternoon in a penny arcade just because the weather is unpleasant... so fair do�s. Then there�s the fact that my dad isn�t very comfortable in social situations. In fact, I suspect he�d rather avoid them if at all possible. Maybe a windy, rainy day on the beach was magnificent isolation, for him.

When I was little he used to make a game of this business of avoiding people. When walking in the woods, we were explorers and he encouraged us to �freeze� if we saw a �native� (which meant a person not known to us). Often as not, a person out walking their dog would pass on by, quite oblivious to us if we stayed quiet and still. It was quite fun, I suppose, until I realised that the reason for the game was how crippling my dad�s shyness was. He really didn�t want to say "good afternoon" to some random person out walking their dog.

Or maybe I misconstrued these things... but at other times I remember him encouraging me to use a similar level of stealth when we were dropping Christmas cards through friends� letterboxes. Because he�d rather be out in the cold at Christmas time than invited into the house of a family friend, for a mince pie or a glass of something.

Sad, but true.

You know what? I�m going to stop thinking I�m nuts. Compared to him, I�m Doctor Frasier f_cking Crane.

Anyway, there was this epiphany, or at least closure on something, when I went back to Brighton at the weekend. I�d been thinking about that whole business of spending a holiday afternoon enduring British weather and doing little more exciting than staying reasonably dry in a hole on the beach... and then I saw some people doing exactly that.

Something like thirty years on, and there they were, hunkered down against the prevailing wind. Maybe it�s the credit crunch? Or maybe it�s just British grit and determination: to enjoy a beach holiday even when there�s no sand and precious little sun. So I feel a little more forgiving about the silly old sod now.

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