There is a shop at Langland Bay selling little packages of fluttering paper flags – Welsh, Scottish, English, and the Union Jack.
Seeing them last weekend, childhood memories flooded back and I had a sudden urge to buy a bucket and spade. Remembering in time that I am a little mature to be crawling around the beach patting upturned buckets, I wondered if I should take some flags home with a bucket and spade for next-door’s baby.
Ok so what if he’s only a month old and has only just managed head control? It won’t be long before he’s ready. Next time I’ll get him some. Buckets and spades and beaches are all essential for child development. No child can ever be bored on a beach…surely?
One of the nice things about last weekend was seeing families enjoying a traditional day at the seaside. It was good sitting with drinks chatting with the eldest boy and observing beach life and the sea.
There was a time when I would have been in the water in a wetsuit with my kid messing about on a surfboard in the shallows like one dad, or messing about throwing a frisbee for a dog like another woman, or providing a traditional beach picnic – complete with a sprinkled seasoning of sand (doggo never failed to provide that finishing touch) or admiring the kids sandcastle handiwork and giving advice on interesting ways of allowing the sea to flood the moat.
Life was a beach when the kids were young and when I was young for that matter. My mother loved the coast, my father was a bus driver so from the age of a few months I was taken to the beach at every opportunity. Virtually every beach along the coast of South Wales, Penarth, Barry Island, Ogmore, Porthcawl, The Rest, Aberavon, Langland, Caswell..etc etc.
Now I can’t go too long inland without a yearning to get sand between my toes and “beach tar on my feet” as Joni sings in Carey – a song that makes me want to sniff the sea air.
Apart from one time when my cousin was prevented in the nick of time from cracking open my skull with a well-aimed metal spade, (Barry Island. Pic of devil cousin below. She’s fine now except she keeps carping on that she’s a year younger than me) I passed many thousands of hours building sandcastles, burying dad, beachcombing, catching crabs and examining rockpools in some detail.
My own kids did much the same, although they never had the rock-pool stamina of their mother and I do hold the record for the biggest crab (which, thinking about it, would only be worth mentioning in France).
When they were young they were more into construction. Their sandcastles were not like mine at all. My efforts were friendly mounds with windows and a door and flags and encrusted with intricate patterns of shells and bits of driftwood or old string and twine. Often, they didn’t even feature a moat – just a kind of garden path that you could actually walk up. They were the Lilliput Lane of castles – ones that the Spanish Inquisition could easily overwhelm using only the comfy cushions.
The boys thought I had entirely the wrong idea. Bearing in mind my sons were poles apart in skill-sets and temperaments – No1 was Thoughtful Builder while No2 was Mischievous Destroyer, it was miraculous that the beach was the one place they did not compete but worked in harmony.
They sensibly ignored my suggestions and constructed far superior and ambitious edifices involving double perimeter walls and ramparts before you even got to the inner castle. There would be imaginary guards, weapons and always a torture chambers. It was all quite gruesome and horrible considering it was just sand and pebbles. Not at all homely. Pretty shells were despised and banned.
The only problem was the moat. They had to wait for the sea to fill it and if the location was wrong, it could take hours. A watched tide, like a kettle, can be very slow and I found it desperately tedious and anti-climactic hanging around covered in goose-pimples on a near-deserted beach to see a wave come and reduce half of the construction to a small pile of glistening sand. They liked it, though.
Dams were the other thing. If the beach was too gritty or pebbly for large-scale fortifications, but had a stream, they quite enjoyed changing the topography. Again, no1 son would be the engineer and no2 the labourer. What was more, Another Unknown But Willing Kid – normally an anathema to no 1 son – might actually be allowed to contribute to the task on the strict understanding they comply with his regulations.
They would be at it for hours. I’d stop reading and wander up to find they had sourced all sorts of rocks, old bits of breeze block, timber and stone and diverted the stream into interesting zig-zags and sections of pools with little rushing rapids. Once, on a Cornish beach, I had to insist that no 1 son re-think the design, having created a large foot-deep lake stocked with one confused crab where a toddler could easily perish.
So beach life was pleasant for a long while. They constructed, dammed, diverted, swam a bit, in freezing cold, they played with the dog and later messed about in an inflatable boat.
My rose-tinted memories come to a halt at the point where they got old enough to climb. I don’t like heights and DT man is not to be relied upon over rough terrain (“My hands! My hands!” Which is fair enough as they are his living) so this new craze for scaling and sitting on rocky outcrops was a new and hazardous departure.
My exhortations “Get off those rocks now. They are private!” didn’t wash, even with conscientious law-abiding ultra-conservative son no1.
The minute my attention was diverted – usually by doggo going begging to other picknickers – there would be a breathless “Mum. Look where S****’s got to!” And son2 would be waving proudly from a ledge half way up the cliff.
Son1, although raising the alarm, would be smirking all over his face because he, being the older and the better climber (and the one who really did end up going proper climbing) would have set the route by which no2 would have got up there.
“Look what’s happened. Go and get him down,” I’d insist to DT man. These things usually happened when he was off-site getting newspapers or snacks and he would be alerted immediately on his return but he remained frustratingly calm in the face of potential disaster.
“He got up there. He’ll get down when he’s ready.”
And actually, he always did. But it was all too nerve-wracking. If only they had inherited my innate and very sensible fear of heights these things wouldn’t happen.
And so it was that when I spotted a kid with a big fortress complex thing on the beach at Langland I said to no1 son “Look. That boy’s built a sandcastle like you used to build….”
A man who looked like he could be dad and a couple of grandparents were standing beside it.
“…..or maybe his dad did it for him,” I added.
“Nah. I think it’s his. The kid’s standing in the middle of it. That’s what you do if it’s your castle.”
Have some Joni.
Boadicea's Chariot 
great blog. my dad is an engineer. beaches bored him. when we were kids on the beach at Climping i remember him passing the time by digging us a moat for our little castle that was so deep it came up to his waist when he stood in it.
LOL So you could have drowned in it? Now that’s a DAD. 😀
This has reminded me of so many days like you describe, unforgettable times of our childhood. Your baby next door will soon be nagging you to be taken to the beach
The beach is a magical place for children, there are so many pretend things to do.
It’s just as magical for us adults too, a winter beach is magical, especially if it’s empty, you see things washed up, the rolling waves are like music; it’s a place to just look and think.
Lovely post Jan
It IS, it IS Val!! 🙂 You feel the same. Nice. Thanks.
Now this is most unfair, Jan. I did think it might be a good day for a trip to the seaside but events dictated that the sandcastles would have to wait. Bad decision!
Mind you, it is far too lovely a day to spend the necessary total of four hours in the car, so the garden will have to do.
The mother was the beach-goer in our family. Often she would bundle us up to go off to the beach, but the coastline of the central Pacific is a chilly place, the water comes from the north, through Alaska, not from the Gulf Stream. So splashing around in the water was something you could only do on the the sunniest day. Instead, we spent more time climbing over the tidepool laced rocks that were also created by the harsh tides of the Pacific. It had its effect though. My brother became a marine biologist and continues to swim around after crustaceans. When my mother died several years ago, we took her ashes to one of her favorite beaches. As my brother said, now she can visit beaches all over the world, all at the same time.
A very nice piece, Janh, nostalgic and tender, even in its comic moments of irritable cousins and pioneering kids.
Hi Araminta. Yes not a good day for road travel. Looked v busy when I was on the bike earlier. Everyone making the most of the last hours of the Easter hols.
Greetings Jaime. I appreciate your comments. Thanks! 🙂 Your beaches were a tad chilly but fascinating, then? Funnily enough my eldest started a marine biol degree but got distracted by website design. He said it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, studying hundreds of different species of barnacle.
That’s a lovely way of remembering your mother. I was going for a cardboard box under an oak tree, but you’ve made me re-think.
PS Swimming around after crustaceans would suit me too. Always thought Jacques Cousteau had an idyllic life.
Great blog Jan; it brings back memories of sitting shivering next to a windbreaker with my sisters…my mum and dad always took us camping to Angelsey in August; the weather was usally either glorious, or terrible inwhich case we’d end up playing cards or chess in the launderette! But even the mention of Angelsey makes me feel like I’m watching those waves… 😉
Great read Jan. I think there is something about living on an island, even a big one like ours, that makes you feel a kinship with coastlines and beaches. The idea of living somewhere like Austria, or even eastern France is awful.
Living in London, I like beachcombing on the Thames foreshore and it never fails to bring back that feeling of contentment that walking along a beach brings.
Thanks for the memories! 😉
Beaches: described with wonderful rose tinted hindsight. Largely I agree, but what about the downside?
* sand in the sandwiches
* cold wind and loss of sunshine just as you come out of the sea
* mother getting tired and irritable at the end of the day and rather roughly drying the children with a sandy towel on salty skin.
* Nearly always sunburnt backs which meant no sleep that night…
Hi Janh1.
Typically soft, West British persiflage and bloody luxury, in my opinion.
Try sitting on the beach at St Andrews in August when the East wind is roaring in at such a rate of knots that you can’t even get close to putting up the windbreak because your frostbitten fingers are numb and in imminent danger of dropping off. Try having your summer Sunday school picnic on the sands of Arbroath and being grateful for the fact that Hitler threatened invasion, if only because it meant that there were pillboxes where you could huddle to avoid hypothermia.
Made me the man I am today, of course.
Great blog and thanks, as always.
I think my brother would agree with your son that computer skills are a more easily flogged job skill, Janh. On the other hand, writing code isn’t far from examining and memorizing hundreds of barnacle names. Cousteau probably did have an idyllic life. Looked that way to me too.
I don’t think I could live in a landlocked country either, Isobel.
Still smiling over the wry, Mr Mackie. Waiting to hear about your days in the Crimea, what.
Ah, happy memories, Janh, of paper flags fluttering on the most elaborate sand castles at Abersoch, Llanbedrog and, later, the beaches of Brittany. The trick was always to build them close enough to the tide-line to ensure the moat was filled by the waves, but far enough away to avoid having a morning’s work demolished by a rogue wave.
OZ
Hi Claire – we only went to Anglesey once which is a pity because I was desperate to go Red Arrows watching at RAF Valley.
I *love* that imagine of chess in the launderette. Rain trickling down steamy windows. I’d forgotten about windbreaks. We had to buy one when we went to Yarmouth on hols as a kid. It was very windy and cold and apart from the fishing boats coming in at Winterton and seeing starfish up close for the first time, it was all pretty bleak.
Totally agree about the coast thing Isobel. Interesting that you beachcomb on the Thames. I’ve always wanted to do that. I know a chap who’s involved with the Thames Explorer thing and I have an open invitation to go mudlarking and looking for Tudor pottery and interesting old bits just up from the Millennium bridge where the old port of London used to be. Is that where you go?
Yes Pseu, I put my hand up to flagrant use of rose-tints to disguise the awful truth.
But it was special because we were generally in harmony, enjoying our various things and I never did get irritable on a beach. The dog always ensured there was sand everywhere. He liked to get close to you when he was wet, stinky and had been digging enthusiastically. Fun to go swimming with, though. 🙂
Greetings John, and thank you for ‘persiflage.’ I had to look it up. It will be my word of the week. 💡
Oooh I can imagine the pain in the fingers at St Andrews and seeking shelter from the whistling sands of Arbroath but you are made of stern stuff north of The Wall.
And your scenery, beautiful in adverse conditions, is unspeakably lovely when the sun has got his hat on.
I spotted my first and last ever Scottish nudist on a very hot day on the beach at Gullane. The boys decided he was the only sensible one on the beach and stripped off too. Scottish weather can delight – I swam at Camusdarach beach, swam not too far from seals near Brodick Castle and in glorious sunshine paddled in the crystal clear waters of Balnakeil Bay. Of such memories dreams are made.
Actually Jaime, now you’ve pointed it out, I see there are similarities. 😀
Hi OZ! 😀 You know Abersoch! Well there’s lovely. Good sand up there. You sound like a sandcastle specialist to me.
Hiya, Janh – Aged four, I’ll have you know I was the Christopher Wren of sandcastles. Eat you heart out, whoever built Criccieth castle.
Best memory of Anglesey, apart from the sand on Rhosneigr beach also aged four – ten or so years later as a starry-eyed air cadet standing on the threshold of the runway at RAF Valley as a Vulcan bomber took off at full chat with that characteristic howl from the Olympus engines right overhead.
Best memory of the “Dead Sparrows” – Five or six years later down at Portland Bill where, purely by chance as far as I was concerned, I sat on the cliffs and watched the Arrows doing one of those late evening, over-the-sea displays. Magic!
OZ
OZ just as I thought! 😀 Though Harlech Castle has the edge over Criccieth, methinks.
Just trying to think of the beach in Anglesey – Red Wharf Bay, I think. Wow, you were a cadet visiting Valley?! Goosebump City experiencing a Vulcan bomber at such close quarters. Saw them several times at Fairford, Glos international air tattoo. I used to think the Italian aerobatic display team put up a good show but something about their routines made me feel a little nervous. The Red Arrows were regulars too. No qualms about them. Sublime skills. Magic is the word. 😀