Babble

For many, many years I would have told you ‘I don’t do beaches’.  I could even have provided photographic evidence to support this statement.  Before we all had digital cameras and phones which will Tweet a photo seconds after it was taken the average person took a lot less photographs.  Consequently, the second photograph that was ever taken of me finds me already several months old and on a beach.  Or, more precisely, in a pram on a beach.  It’s a proper, old fashioned perambulator the size of Sussex which I know had been passed down through the family, starting with my cousin Trevor, who is fifteen years my senior, through a number of other cousins to find itself transporting me onto a beach.  Why I’ve been wheeled there rather than carried isn’t clear to me but there I am, sitting up and wearing a jacket.  Yes, wearing a little jacket.  You might assume that this is a winter visit to a beach but the presence of my older brothers in trunks working away with buckets and spades in the background would tell you otherwise.  Still, I look happy enough.  I’m sure there are many other photographs from my childhood in the family collection that show me tanned, wearing some 70’s skimpy trunks, frolicking on the beach and thoroughly enjoying it but in my teens my ‘I don’t do beaches’ belief slowly emerged.  I recall this but have further proof of this since I have a picture of me aged twenty three in which I couldn’t look less like someone who ‘does beaches’.  Once again, I am surrounded by people ‘doing beaches’ by ‘doing ice creams’, ‘doing sandcastles’ and wearing fewer clothes than one might normally put themselves inside.  Unfortunately, an awkwardness developed within me in my teens that was particularly present on beaches perhaps because of the ‘free, easy, carefree frolicking’ normally associated with beaches and the lack of clothing one normally associates with beaches.  I had decided that I had a physique which might induce mental illness in ordinary people and consequently, liked to keep it covered.  Positively, in this photograph I am wearing shorts.  However, I am also wearing shoes.  Not sandals or flip-flops or espadrilles but proper shoes with laces.  I’m also wearing a long sleeved shirt although the sleeves are rolled up.  Most noteworthy of all is that I’m reading The Sunday Telegraph.  Books are for beaches.  The Sun is for Beaches.  Magazines are for beaches.  The Sunday Telegraph is not for beaches.  It is obvious in this photograph that I’m trying to ignore the fact that my picture is being taken but my expression clearly expresses a desire for the ground to swallow me up; “Can we bury you up to your beck?”...”Why stop there”.

 

Let’s jump forward in time to me aged thirty two and my first visit to the United States.  Myself and my partner landed in Atlanta, Georgia and meandered for ten days through Georgia and the Carolinas until meeting up with friends in Tallahassee, Florida.  After a splendid weekend with them we headed south to explore the Florida coast.  They had recommended we visit a coastal town I no longer recall the name of but I do remember that after ten days of falling in love with America and Americans it didn’t impress me.  At all.  Feeling unimpressed we stopped at a restaurant and I had a fishfood pizza which only increased my sudden feeling of dissatisfaction.  We moved on to visit the towns of Port St. Joe and Apalachicola which were much more charming and then in the early evening began looking for accommodation for the night.  We spotted a sign for ‘Turtle Beach Inn’ which I chose to follow and after following a narrow twisting road parked outside a house which appeared to be on stilts.  We were greeted by Trish, the owner, and agreed to stay for the night without looking at the house or the room.  The pattern of our stay in the US so far had been touring and not staying anywhere for longer than one night.  Trish gave us the key and we wandered around the deck which surrounded the house towards our room.  It was then that I saw exactly where I was.  This house was on the beach.  Not by the beach but on the beach.  Steps led down from the balcony onto the beach and a few dozen more footsteps placed your feet into the waters of the Gulf Of Mexico.  I looked to my left and right and although I saw many houses I didn’t see any other people.  None.  This wasn’t like the claustrophobic British beaches I’d previously visited.  What I saw was just miles of pale, silvery sand.  I went into the room, changed quickly and descended the steps and was almost instantly in the warm waters.  I swam away from the houses while my partner tentatively entered the water.  I looked back and laughed aloud.  I really did.  What you need to understand is that I come from a very small town.  A boy called Luke Stamford started at my comprehensive school two weeks later than the rest of the year because he was on holiday in Spain.  Spain!!  The idea of someone taking a foreign holiday was so novel that I still remember this event over three decades later.  I didn’t leave the country until I was twenty three.  It just wasn’t ever within the realistic range of my financial ambitions.  And yet here I was swimming in the Gulf of Mexico.  The icing on the cake was that then three dolphins appeared in the ocean about thirty metres away from me.  They swam and jumped around for a few minutes and then disappeared.  Still smiling broadly I left the water, dried myself and returned to the Inn to find Trish. 

“I think we’d like to stay for a little longer than one night”

“How long?”

“Well, we aren’t due back at Atlanta airport for eight days”.                  

 

I have a photograph of a beach in the panhandle area of Florida.  It shows a thirty two year old man running away from a pile of clothes and away from the camera.  He is naked.  He does beaches.