Dateline: Marbella, August 2…
Eleven days into a family holiday (nine of them, four under age six), email to office:
“I have been told to 'bloody stop working and come to the beach!' - a venue I hate with a single-minded passion because of all the dog ends, dog excrement and dog-women, but rather than end up in the dog house, I will submit with a hang-dog expression. Mobile is with me this time - but not the laptop. It would be, but there's no wi-fi on the beach…”
Sitting there, camping chair under an umbrella, shorts, knotted hanky on head and ruminating on the meaning of life while half of Spain is frolicking in the sand and reminding me that with half the population unemployed where else is there to go for free than the beach?
Ruminating on the last time I was on a beach… Blackpool in May, which reminded me of a piece I once wrote asking why the surf on Blackpool Beach was a peculiar brown colour, while that in Marbella was not… There are a number of suggested theories, often from Blackpool arcade operators, and equally often disconcerting in content.
It also reminded me of my favourite beach, Noordwijk on the Dutch North Sea coast. Unfair to compare it with Blackpool of course. Noordwijk is about one tenth the size, but it is sooooo genteel, the Dutch are lovely, the hotels are all up to a standard not down to a price, the beach restaurants offer alternatives to fish and chips and the surf a pristine white.
And there is only one arcade, owned by Hommerson, I think, not that there is anything moralistically incorrect about arcades – a valuable local service when it’s dull, grey and drizzly as it is so often in Blackpool. But Blackpool doesn’t have those Dutch croquets, or those little shrimps in mayo inside a crusty roll served with impeccable courtesy and excellent English from a little kiosk on the sea front.
Biased? Probably. Unsupported suppositions relative to the murky brown of the Blackpool surf? Also maybe… But it is interesting that no-one ever seems to be swimming…
