So that’s the end of our summer hols. We are all back in our cubicles. The buckets and spades are back in the cupboard and the sub-editors are peeling off their sunburned skin and rolling it up and flicking the bits at the arts desk.
As it turns out, I was busy as a bee while away. Luckily, some of that busyness involved reading books, and as it was sunny a lot of the time I had the brilliant idea of taking my bucket and spade down to the beach along with my book. Actually there’s no point in taking a bucket and spade down to the beach because it’s Brighton and pebblecastles aren’t a thing. So it was just me and a book and the sun and all the people who had the same bright idea as me, although most of them weren’t reading books.
It was a lot more exciting than I thought it was going to be. You would have thought that not much happens on a beach, but if you stay there long enough and keep your eyes open, you get to see plenty. I could write an I Spy book on the subject.
On my first day I noticed three men sitting behind me and a little to the west. They all looked identical but without being related, if you see what I mean. A little bit overweight, but not fat – you might have called them “sleek”, in the manner of people who are used to dining often at very good restaurants. They all looked to be in their forties, and had identically shaven heads. This sent me off on a reverie where I imagined they were all gangsters and then they noticed I was staring at them, and I had a sudden twinge at the thought of them pulling my fingernails out to find out what I knew, so I turned over and stuck my nose back in my book. (I did once know someone in Brighton who had his fingers broken by gangsters, but that’s another story for another day.)
The book was pretty good but I found beach life too intriguing. Each day I found myself by the RNLI station a hundred yards west of the burned-out ruins of the West Pier, favoured by the starlings as a venue for their evening murmurations, but not at this time of year. The lifeguards are fascinating. One day, three of them were young men, and each one seemed to embody a different kind of stereotype of the Californian beach bum: one, older than the others, with shades and a ’tache and with his floppy RNLI sunhat pinned up at the sides as if he was going on safari; another, stocky and looking like Brad Pitt circa 2000, and one gangly youth with pipe-cleaner legs and a mop of curly ginger hair. If the hair had been a little straighter, and if he’d had a little budding goatee, he would have been a dead ringer for Shaggy from the Scooby-Doo gang. As for the lady lifeguards, they all had blonde hair, legs like gazelles and the perfect skin of the under-25s, apart from one of them, who had brown hair. All were charming and professional: they all looked out to sea continuously, as if they meant it.
The highlight of one day was when a member of the public came up and said she’d spotted someone on the West Pier who was jumping or diving off it. Now, as anyone who lives here knows, this is the stupidest thing you can do in Sussex apart from standing on the edge of the crumbly chalk cliffs of Beachy Head; it’s possibly even stupider. Being on it is risky enough; diving off it is insane, for who knows what degraded and lethal spars and girders of the former pier lie beneath the waves. I watched one of the female lifeguards get on her RNLI surfboard and paddle out to the wreck. It seemed like an impossible distance, with a fraught destination. Any fantasies I had been entertaining of becoming a lifeguard vanished at that point.
Her colleague kept vigil on the beach, peering through binoculars and occasionally getting updates on his walkie-talkie. We chatted briefly about the dinlo (a word I picked up from my friend Ben: it means idiot) on the pier; he said people had been jumping off the groynes earlier, and that was stupid, too. I asked how dangerous jumping off the groynes was, but that was mainly because I like saying the word “groynes”.
And so the long day wore on. A little girl next to me had improvised a game where she was trying to throw pebbles into her beach shoes. I smiled in encouragement as she smiled shyly at me. The tide had been coming in and I had been daring the sea to get me wet. A rogue wave suddenly washed over a bank of stones and I had to scuttle fast, backwards, on my bum and almost tore my biceps out with the effort. A couple of toddlers, who might have been twins, were not so agile and were caught out. One of them, even though she was in her bathing suit, failed to see the funny side. But everyone else did.
It was a timeless scene – at one point I heard a brass band start up. I turned to glare at whoever’s mobile or Bluetooth speaker was responsible. But no, it was a real brass band, playing in the bandstand, and everything was all right again.
[See also: Lord Byron’s sex education]
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This article appears in the 27 Aug 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Gentle Parent Trap