Vieux garçon de la plage

 

I’ve lived close to a beach one way or another for nearly seventy years. Childhood visits to Weymouth led me to believe that the word “sandwich” came from the gritty stuff that found its way between two slices of bread. It put me off seaside picnics for a while. But elsewhere you could avoid the grit by walking on the pier above. Here are just a few I have come to know well.

At home in “Historic Portsmouth and Sunny Southsea”, as polyonymously promoted (so hopeful, they named it twice), we often visited South Parade Pier, later burnt down while Ken Russell was using it as a location for The Who’s “rock opera” Tommy (1974). The flames are in the film. But my main memories are of the view of the pier while waiting in all weathers at the adjacent bus stop. Along the prom, in a glass case at the entrance to Clarence Pier’s amusements was the animated model of the “Laughing Sailor”, a grotesque which frightened generations of children since 1910. It has more recently been kept out of harm’s way in a museum. 

For two hundred years, Ryde Pier has been a major passenger connection between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. On moving to Ryde, my father briefly commuted to Portsmouth Dockyard on the ferry from Pier Head, sharing the journey, and the occasional beer, with the locally lauded “commuter club” of those who took the train to London every day, two hours each way. I’ve known the pier all my life, from the days when electric trams and steam trains ran along it, to today when all points to Shanklin are fittingly served by repurposed London Underground stock. At Sandown, a large sign on the pier proclaims “A Whole Day’s Fun in One”. Whatever that means, it certainly wasn’t fun for one Chris Tarrant listening to a bunch of bleary eyed Barbershop blokes singing to him under my baton, under the pier, on breakfast television forty years ago.

A psychiatrist once told me that The Solent is crisscrossed by people escaping from themselves, to or from the “Mainland” (as we wishfully call Britain). The fact that I found myself nursing the same individuals on both sides of the water attests to this. At least, on a pier, you can cross the sea without actually travelling. Or maybe you do, as if on a bridge to anywhere you like, real or imagined. Boldly going where thousands have trod before. In the 1950s, many Cymry went to the fleshpots of England on a paddle steamer from Penarth Pier (Glamorgan) to Ilfracombe (Devon). Particularly on a Sunday, when Cymru was “closed”. The original booze cruise.

Today, on the pier at Llandudno, I am regaled by the music of many lands from assorted lockup stalls along the deck. The sounds of Yacht Rock, Beach Boys, Bossa Nova, Bob Marley, Martha and the Muffins and Mungo Jerry blend together in a summery seaside vibe. Somehow the music merges with the aromas of posh coffee, candy floss, chips and fried fish. Indeed, in Cymraeg idiom, a smell is heard [“Dw i’n clywed arogl”: “I hear a smell”]. Synaesthesia, semantics or both? I am a “Surfer Boy”. Not riding the waves, but writing in the ether of the net.

I would have titled this post "Surfin’ UK" if it wasn't for that overused abbreviation. Since Brexit, the moniker UK has been forced on us through every news medium, from across the political spectrum, as if anathema to refer to any of the five nations individually: including the Cornish nation where I have some genetic heritage.  Am I the only one to have noticed the propaganda? I won't mention the UK's scatalogical assocation with fashion chain French Connection.

The beach and the pier symbolise a quantum dislocation between global village and nationalism, between corporatisation and isolationism, between those who worship the ocean and those escaping across it. By the sea you can be, in an instant, in Bondi, Copacabana, Guantanamo, Ipanema, Mar del Plata, Ostend, Porthcawl, Santa Monica, Traeth Morfa Bychan or Ventnor. Or maybe not. The imagined beach is just that. No matter where, the ambience is similar, the imported palms and the restaurant fayre are the same. That may be no bad thing, as long as there is no sand in the sandwiches. 

LINKS

Les Garçons de la Plage | The Rutles Wiki | Fandom

A Walk Along Brighton Palace Pier – The Liminal Residency

The History of South Parade Pier

Lucy Melford: The Laughing Sailor

Penarth - National Piers Society

BBC Wales - Catchphrase -