Most of us harbour a desire to shoot off to the seaside when things get hot and crowded in the city. You head to the coast, where there’s a bit of a breeze. My poem describes the seaside as “a world away from the working week”. Unless you’re a fisherman, in which case that doesn’t apply.
I can’t remember having a bad time at the seaside. Maybe I’ve been lucky. Although I do remember a lot of punch-ups ... rite of passage that.
My first trips to the seaside must have been family holidays to Blackpool or Rhyl. This was obviously before the days of package tours to the Costa Brava. Any holidays anybody had, that’s where they were – at one of our many seaside resorts.
It took so long to get from Salford to Blackpool – all on A roads – that the coach had to stop halfway so people could use the lavatory. And north Wales felt like another world – because it wasn’t England. It was like a holiday abroad ... in a slightly rainier land. Coming from Manchester that’s quite an accolade. It pissed down all the time.
The first time I heard rock’n’roll on a big sound system would have been at a fairground at the seaside. That’s a hell of a sensory experience right there.
In this country as soon as the weather gets nice, adult males start exposing their bodies. The horror, the horror. As for this beach body-ready idea, it doesn’t affect me because I can’t swim. I keep me trousers on so I’ve got nothing to worry about on that score.
It’s miserable wearing black all the time, unless you’re Johnny Cash. I try to mix it up a bit now. You gotta brighten your life up at this age. On the beach I wouldn’t wear anything that exposes any acreage of flesh, but my colour palette would tend more towards the pastel. A Michael Portillo jacket and a nice T-shirt.
If you want to know why the coast is such an inspirational place, ask Herman Melville, Jack London, Nordhoff and Hall, Robert Louis Stevenson or Joseph Conrad. It’s a glimpse of eternity. It invites rumination, the relentless whisper of the tide against the shore.
I’ve circumnavigated these islands thousands of times, visiting derelict holiday resorts, and they all have this fascination. As soon as you’ve got the sea in the background it’s gonna be an interesting place. I live in Essex now, which has a very estuarine edge to it. There are many inland beaches, places like Point Clear, Jaywick Sands. Terrific dreamlike places that repay the casual visitor a thousandfold.
I’m not banging the drum for Essex, but if Clacton-on-Sea is anything to go by, a lot of our holiday resorts are getting a real good revamp. Clacton-on-Sea, Walton-on-the-Naze, Frinton-on-Sea. Fantastic places. And Essex, well, it’s God’s county. It never rains there.
The coast slows you down in a way. A meditative cast of mind is encouraged in that kind of topography just generally. And where meditation exists, can romance be far behind? Everybody’s got a seaside romance. In fact I wrote a song about a soured seaside romance many years ago called ‘I mustn’t go down to the sea again’.
The very pointlessness of a sea walk is it’s attractiveness to me. It’s in the poem I wrote for the National Trust: “A pointless walk along the coast, that’s what floats my boat the most.” You get the fresh air. It gives you an appetite.
A walk along the greensward at Frinton-on-Sea is among my favourite seaside strolls. It’s an area of greenery that runs parallel to the actual beach, which is about 80 feet below. It’s a terrific spot. With the sun shining on it there is no finer place.
I love Clacton and its jollity and what have you, but Frinton has this veneer of the riviera that’s beautiful. They’ve got a whole art deco corner that’s like a miniature Miami beach.
Every flourishing holiday resort has a snotty next-door neighbour that is anything but. Like St Annes-on-Sea right next to Blackpool. Frinton has always been the snotty neighbour of Clacton-on-Sea. They only acquired a fish-and-chip shop 10 years ago and, I’m not making this up, it signified such a seismic social shift that it made it into the leader column of the Times. Now they’ve got a pub!
