Of seaside towns, summer showers and coastal walks
Nostalgia for childhood holidays revisited
I’m writing this in a holiday cottage in West Wales, near the popular seaside resort of Tenby. Our cottage sits on the edge of a wide, open field looking out onto gently rolling hills.
On the first night it was so quiet here I fell asleep almost immediately, something I rarely do in London, where I’m often kept awake by ambient light, the rumble of passing cars or the wild, sadomasochistic passion of fornicating foxes (no, I am not making that up. The sex life of the urban fox is notoriously noisy).
The rest of the world feels impossibly distant. But that’s the aim of a holiday, after all.
However, we’ve not escaped from the Great British Summer.
We’ve been dodging downpours and heavy showers in our attempts to make the most of our break. The Met Office is gently trolling me. It keeps tweeting weather maps showing that the sunniest part of the country is where we went last year. Or the year before.
This wet and windy weather is making me nostalgic.
I’m reminiscing about the wet-dog, bucket-and-spade holidays of my childhood, where we’d rent a self-catering cottage and spend time exploring the local area.
And here we are again, walking around a small seaside town with shops selling fudge, sticks of rock, inflatable dinghies and body boards. Seagulls squawking raucously overhead. The warm, vinegary aroma of fish and chips gusting on the wind, seasoned with brine and seaweed. The bright, gaudy lights of the amusement arcades with their one-armed bandits and claw machines, where I never won anything, not even a cheap plastic key-ring.
And then there’s the people huddling in their hoodies as they head down to the beach. Sometimes it’s the children dragging their reluctant parents, sometimes it’s the other way round. The wind might be blowing sand everywhere, the clouds on the horizon are pregnant with rain and the water’s freezing but none of that matters.
We will enjoy our holiday, whatever the weather. We will spend some time at the seaside, because that’s what you do on a family holiday. We’re got windbreaks and kagoules and wellies, and we’re not afraid to use them.
Or lose them in a big gust of wind.
We leave the beach to the child-architects and their castles of sand, and go for a walk along part of the Pembrokeshire Coastal Path.
There’s something about coastlines that leaves me overwhelmed by a sense of profound awe in the face in the presence of deep time. I’m drawn to them, as though craving the knowledge of my own personal insignificance.
Rock formations aeons old weathering away by the roiling restless patience of the ocean. In time, they will form a new sea floor, which will ultimately be compressed into new rock as the cycle turns again. Perhaps, sometime in the impossibly distant future, whoever or whatever comes after us will discover the fossilised remains of lost car keys, flip-flops and mobile phones and wonder what manner of being left them there.
No staycation in the UK is complete without visiting historic sites. In Wales, that means castles. There are a lot of castles in Wales. Over 400, in fact. You can blame the early Plantagenet kings for them, the remains of a thirteenth century ‘ring of iron’ built to subdue the Welsh.
It’s a history that still has emotional resonance. A proposed ‘ring of iron’ structure has now been put on hold following a public backlash.
Whilst I’m now happy to wander round the medieval ruins, trying to get a sense of the past, that wasn’t always the case. ‘No, not another castle!’ cried the little girl in front of us as her parents walked up to the ticket office.
That was me, once. Literally.
Dad still won’t let me forget it.
The holiday is over. I’m back in London washing holiday laundry. Looking back over the week away, it strikes me remarkable it is that everything is just the same as it has been.
Okay, we didn’t have smartphones for checking the weather and the seagulls are much more aggressive when it comes to stealing chips, but the continuities far outnumber the changes.
Even the things we do on holiday don’t change that much.
Small children rush off to build sandcastles, teenagers hang back trying to look as though they’re not actually with their parents, old couples sit on benches and gaze out to sea in companionable silence.
All I need now is a damp Labrador or wet retriever, and then my nostalgia will be complete.
