Lie On The Beach

I think I was six years old when I first remember seeing the sea for the first time. I'm positve that my parents must have taken me to the seaside before then but if so I had no particular memory of it. At that time we had been living in the midlands for a couple of years and so we were as far from the coast as it is possible to get. Also my sister was four by then; more transportable than before. We had no car in those days so long family journeys were expensive and potentially traumatic (my little sister hovered on the bondaries of mania as a toddler. Anything that wasn't bolted down when she was awake was in danger.)

I am not sure exactly where it was that we stayed. It was a guest house, rather than a hotel, basic but comfortable, except on the days that it rained when it seemed as cold and bleak inside as it did out. "Out" was somewhere on the Anglian coast. Great Yarmouth probably ... it was definitely the kind of place where the tide goes up and down more than in and out. At Weston-super-mare, for example, the sea retreats more than half a mile at low tide. Outrageous.

Anyway, the resort's limited horizontal range of tidal movement would be significant. I remember with perfect clarity the day I first set my bare feet upon that golden sand. It was cold. There was a fairly bracing breeze (a nor-easterly I would imagine, that being typical North Sea weather for August). It kept the temperature down but the sun was out more than in because the clouds scudded across the beach quite merrily with the wind at their backs. The cool air I accepted as fact, but inside the mind of a six year old the associations are still fluid and subject to less rigorous laws ... the sand could still be warm if wanted to be, couldn't it? Of course as a child I absorbed this data at the sub-conscious level and I feel now that it is significant, although I am not sure how, that I don't remember what I was wearing nor my mother. My father had on his usual holiday costume that consisted of a polo shirt and smartly creased slacks; Sundays and holidays were the only days he never wore a neck tie ....

So the sand was cool to my little kiddie feet and I still remember the feeling of surprise and the pang of disappointment. It was so fixed in my mind's imagination that seaside sand would have to be warm. I had no reason to expect otherwise and although I had no reason for the belief, it was just an opinion of the kind that kids form about everything. It happens, I think, about time that schooling begins and little proto-adults suddenly become smart-arses over night. Anything we don't know we make up. I always imagined this was probably because that was how it seemed to us kids when adults came up with answers to our questions. Why do kids ask questions? It's a good one that! Can it be possible that the answers they seek are more for entertainment than for knowledge. It certainly must seem to a child that the exactness and correctness of an answer is a lot less important than the fun gained from the revelation.

So theory number one bites the dust. I guessed, not for the first time nor for the last, that I wasn't nearly so clever as I imagined. Sand is not always magically warm. Kids are resilient little buggers and two steps onto the sand were sufficient to cast aside the disappointment and turn instead to the serious business in hand. To impress my sister with my skill at building sand castles. I knew all about sand castles. Had I not read the definitive guide to sand castle building, the unforgettable: Janet and John Go To The Seaside? Besides it was hardly rocket science. I had all the necessary tools, a little spade with a steel blade painted bright red and a small tin plate bucket painted, inside and out, in a riot of colours. Sand castle building was so simple a child could do it. Fill bucket. Turn bucket over. Tap bottom of bucket gently. Lift off bucket and ....

Oh!

Hmm. This is gonna take some practice, I can see that! Must make sure that no sand falls out while tipping bucket over. Nope that doesn't work either. Maybe I am tapping too hard. No. Tap harder then. No, again. Argh! I'm an idiot! I can make a sandcastle stand up. By now I had half a dozen conical piles of sand forming, well, nothing to be honest except little heaps of sand. In retrospect I can see now that I was also missing out on the fun of the delicious irony that my pointy cones of sand were pointless. Being a kid isn't half the fun it is cracked up to be.

It was at this point that my father spotted my problem having finally relieved himself of the burdens of baskets and bags and towels and rugs and bottles of pop. Smiling he explained that the sand had to be wet.

Duh!

I have been like that all my life, I think. I rarely bother to ask how, I just do. Half the time I figure it out for myself and then feel pretty good and smug about it. The rest of the time is the problem. Either I will just give up, maybe I will decide that I like what I've achieved so far and call that success anyway (like my attempts to play a keyboard for example), only rarely do I go in search of human assistance. I think it's because I have this powerful need to be in control; I hate to surrender any aspect of my life to someone else for any reason. Lately I have been forced to give up some of my reluctance on that matter and on the whole the experience has been less than fun but not as terrible as I might have anticipated. I suppose that's a good sign. I should be more trusting, more open, more willing to ask for (and take) help when help is needed. Besides, smugness isn't pretty either and I am now living proof (to myself) that pride indeed goes before a fall.