Seaside Special...

 The country has charms only for those not obliged to stay there. (Edouard Manet)

After last weekend's Latitude Festival, due to a chain of unforseeable events, I was forced to spend 24 hours in a small town on the East Coast of England.  

I won't tell you how we got there (there were two of us) which is a story in itself, but we spent all Monday waiting for a ride out: someone who'd voluteered to take us all the way to Oxford but couldn't get to us until the evening. The ride would come at 5, perhaps 7pm. We would make the best of it. We would have a day at the seaside. We might even enjoy ourselves.

The town, which has an amber museum and a sailors' reading room, is the closest point to the Netherlands on the British coast and - as a holiday resort - is built for enjoyment. While my companion was asleep I read the guidebooks in the flat we had found ourselves renting. Inside the books children played on the sunny beach. Outside the books - outside our window, which said, DO NOT OPEN - elderly people in expensive maritime anoraks walked up and down the main street carefully transporting newspapers through a fine drizzle.

Don't get me wrong: this place was heaven compared to the day before but...

After WG Sebald travelled through East Anglia,  Stuart Jeffries retraced his steps for The Guardian, finding a 

kind of narrative unreliability that makes you wonder if Sebald's stories can be trusted at all. At a hilariously dismal-sounding Lowestoft hotel, did he really bend his fork on a battered fish "that had doubtless lain entombed in the deep-freeze for years"? And can it really be true that the narrow-gauge railway near here once carried a train originally built in China to convey the emperor?

Like Sebald, we found that our town provided two types of excitement: the natural...

and the specially invented.

We were slightly sad to find that the pier's slot machines had been converted into a selection of atemporal/Steampunk objects which were just a bit bossy about the way you might enjoy them.

There's no joke so bad as one that explains itself, especially on a dull day (or maybe we were just in no mood for it).

We were delighted to find a genuinely atemporal cafe in a dark basement complete with cress garnishes, salad cream in sachets, and waitresses who were both rude and slow.

There is nothing good to be had in the country, or, if there be, they will not let you have it. (William Hazlitt)

We especially liked the cake Tardis whose unecessarily brightly-lit, inedible-looking, coconut-frosted contents were mechanized. The stand spun round at unexpected speed, bringing the whole thing into someone's idea of the modern world.

By the end of the day we found we had visited neither the Amber Museum nor the Sailors' Reading Room. We did not go onto the beach which was a violence of waves and gravel. Having saved the excitement of the chuch with its pre-Reformation painted wood screen and roof until the end of the day, we found it had closed at 4pm. 

We had visited various cafes, shops and the boutique - where my friend bought an on-sale Barbour - three, or perhaps four, times, once to look for a pair of sunglasses we had left. 

The hours between 5 and 7pm were long. I did a lot of pacing on the cream carpet inside the flat in front of the window that said, DO NOT OPEN. My companion said, I hope you're you not still wearing your outdoor shoes!

I'll be talking about walking in the city and the country this weekend at the Port Eliot Festival: 3pm in Dovegreyreader's tent on Saturday and 4pm at the Idler Academy on Sunday.

Comments

[sakura]

The cake tardis, I love that! It's like your short stay happened in the Twilight Zone.

[Lola Is Beauty]

That sudden drop sign makes it look like a really fun thing to do! And every grim coastal town should have a cake tardis.

[badaude]

I was weirdly tempted by the sudden drop, as Lauren can tell you...

[DBC Reed]

Sounds like Southwold: its supposed to be up-market compared with Great Yarmouth and everywhere else.Amber is said to wash up on the beach but it never does.The trip round the Adnams brewery has its enthusiasts but I never went.That kind of place really.Once popular with artists drawn by the abject poverty and consequent low rents.

[badaude]

I decline to confirm or deny the location.

It certainly wasn't low-rent in any sense of the word. Maybe it's easier to forgive places that are (although the food was categorically high-end, for which, at the time, I was very grateful).

[Rachel]

Loved this (even if you may not have entirely enjoyed the experience)... I read Rings of Saturn a few months ago and judging from your experience I think it's safe to say that Sebald got the spirit of the place right even if he was an unreliable narrator!

(I think the cake Tardis should be introduced into all future episodes of Dr Who. Are you reading this, Steven Moffat...?)

[DBC Reed]

So it was Southwold!
Definitely not low-rent now ( more snobbish). The low-rent era was way back in the time of Philip Wilson Stear (?) ,the so called English Impressionist, and Emerson the very stagey photographer .Stanley Spencer went there too.Your record of the place is better