I have believed for a long
time that I am cursed. Deep down I know it’s highly unlikely but it could be
the root cause of a lot of issues that have blighted my life; unhappy
childhood, the slow burn of my career, loss of my daughter, bad relationship
choices, and above all the fact that I seem to suffer with a human
manifestation of Sod’s Law. If I leave the house without an umbrella it will
piss down, if I take a coat it will be hotter than Hell itself (even though
there’s no such place), if I take exactly the right money to the shop the price
will have gone up, and so many more. To use an old joke, if I fell in a barrel
of tits I would come out sucking my thumb, that’s how my luck works. Maybe I
did something wrong without realising it, maybe my mother had a curse put on
her first born when she was a child, whatever the reason I am used to the fact
that nothing very often goes my way.
Imagine you had worked through
a couple of weeks of boiling hot sunshine, imagine it being so hot that even
the act of sweating makes you sweatier. Imagine it’s the duvet on the floor,
naked on the bed with the window open level of hot that we get for a brief
period during the summer. Then imagine you take a day off to go to the seaside
and it pisses down with rain all morning. It wouldn’t happen to you would it?
Maybe not, but it would fucking happen to me.
By the time we had reached the train station this morning I was
irritable and wanted nothing more than to go home and never take time off work
again. Our original plan had been to sit outside the café near the station and
have breakfast as we couldn’t sit inside with Jack. Of course it couldn’t
happen that way, and if I can’t have a fry-up before I travel anywhere, then
I’m not travelling. Thanks to the rain we had to have breakfast separately,
with Mandi popping into the shop for something for the train and a takeaway
coffee and then me going to the café for breakfast. To make matters worse we
had a train carriage full of council estate families all making far more noise
than is acceptable on a train. It was still raining when we got to Skegness so
I assumed that we were in for a shit day.
The first thing we did was
walk down Richmond Drive away from town and up a tree lined path called Vine
Walk towards the Vine Hotel, at the end of this road is Drummond Road, a long
road that stretches from town to Gibraltar Point. The reason for coming here is
that I wanted to see our old house. Our family moved to Skegness in 1989 and I
left home in 1993 making it my last family home. Although there are a lot of
changes, the house is still there.
no blue plaque yet
Opposite the house is a road
that leads on to the beach via a marshland of sand dunes, although thanks to
the rain we couldn’t walk over it to get to the beach. Once we found our way to
the beach it had started to brighten up a little, so I took Jack for a paddle.
He wasn’t sure what to make of it at first but I think he enjoyed it.
No trip to the seaside is
complete without fish and chips, and of course there’s plenty to choose from in
Skegness. However I was able to take advantage of my insider knowledge (despite
it being twenty years since I lived here) and choosing a specific chippie.
Holidaymakers and day-trippers will eat any old shit, but people who live in
Skegness used Eptons, thankfully still the best in town. Fish and chips each,
mine with mushy peas, a sausage for Jack and two cans of Coke came to just over
seventeen pounds, which is rather cheap considering their reputation.
A lot has changed as I
imagined it would, the obvious things like shop names of course stuck out. The
arcades are still there and a few of the pubs, but a lot of structural changes
had been carried out too; the park on the front, Tower Gardens, has moved
everything around, as has Compass Gardens next to the clock tower. When I lived
there it was very much a seasonal town that closed down after the six week
holiday and enjoyed one last hurrah during October half term. There was
Christmas late night shopping and a few odd winter attractions but Skegness
pretty much closed for the winter and the owners of boating lakes, ice cream
vans, chip shops, crazy golf, donkeys and the
like all buggered off abroad after working their arses off during the
summer. These days there is a lot to offer visitors during the year as a whole
which to my mind is a bit of a shame. I used to love seeing the difference
between a bustling holiday resort and a desolate cold ghost town. There’s a
beautiful bleakness of a seaside resort in winter, gift shops boarded up, half
the seafront pubs shut, the boating lake empty, the gates locked on the
funfair, that sort of thing. In the weeks leading up to Easter things would
slowly start to reawaken, as if someone was colouring in a black and white
picture until at last the town was ready to welcome visitors once again.
Skegness was created at the
height of the Victorian boom in seaside holidays, although very little
Victorian architecture survives. A few years ago there was a fire on the
seafront that gutted an old building that was either once a Victorian hotel or
block of flats. The fire was started deliberately in a fight over territory,
(Skegness businesses are owned by only a handful of families and one family
wanted to buy an arcade that wasn’t for sale, not wanting to take no for an
answer it was burned down) and it has been replaced with an eyesore of a
building.
Another thing Skegness was known for was the ‘bracing’ sea air, and
as such people from the industrial Midlands were often sent there for periods
of convalescence to counteract all the shit that filled their lungs as a result
of working in a mine. The connection is still in evidence in the smallest ways;
you can buy The Nottingham Post and read it while
eating a bowl of mushy peas with mint sauce. It’s just like being at home
except you have the bracing sea air, or force nine gales ripping up from the
sea, depending on whether your glass is half full or half empty.
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