My daily trip around the world, courtesy of a series of live webcams, always includes a visit to the faded seaside glamour of West Bay in Dorset. It’s long out of season and the main camera focuses on the main square by the harbour, home of the little takeaway huts, all bar one closed for winter. Boats bob up and down in the harbour, protected from the swells of the English channel. There are a few mainly elderly people shuffling around, all dressed up to see off the coastal drizzle. There is next to nothing to do. I wish I was there.
I went there on holiday as a child, with my mother, her mother and my two paternal grandparents, I thought for many years, but I have long wondered if it was only once. What I do remember is a tiny caravan with no toilet or bathroom, no cooking facilities and no proper plumbing.
I am pretty sure we stayed there for two weeks, never once leaving West Bay, not even to visit nearby Bridport. My grandad and I might climb the cliff up to the golf course at the top, or in the direction of Eype to skim stones. The weather, like today, was uniformly grey and damp and this would have been at the height of the English summer. We never once went on the beach to do something like sunbathing. What did we do for two whole weeks?
We never ate out, not that I knew the people actually ate out. I existed on a diet of sandwiches in the van and burgers from the burger hut. Mostly I have no memory of the days and evenings, likely because there is nothing to remember, except the rain battering down on our caravan. “Everybody loves a summer holiday,” sang Cliff Richard, and somehow I must have, too, because while our holiday was somewhat frugal, it does not count as a bad experience. It can’t do because I always want to go back.
And just occasionally I do go back, if only for a day, and just for a moment I am that little boy again, walking aimlessly around the harbour, or around the vast caravan site and as the light grew dim, reading and re-reading my comics of The Spider, who was a very different character from Spiderman. (See above.) West Bay has changed over the years, with modern, upmarket apartments by the harbour side and a modernised, safer harbour itself, which doesn’t look anywhere as good as it used to look, but – and here I lurch uncomfortably into a fluffy little imaginary world – it still feels the same.
I am one of those elderly folk now and not a young boy, yet despite the lines and aches and pains of age this remains a place that is close to my heart. And I remain a simple man with simple pleasures. I am happy to breathe in the fresh sea air and gaze wistfully out to see as the drizzle turns to steady rain. Maybe it’s time for yet another burger or even a pint?
It’s not just West Bay, though. I have a thing about out of season seaside resorts. Nearby Weymouth crackles with vibrancy throughout the summer months, but some say it looks and feels even better when all the tourists have gone home. And earlier this year we visited beautiful Port Isaac in Cornwall, so beautiful to walk through and admire, yet being ghostly and deserted due to the proliferation of holiday homes meaning hardly any locals can afford to live there. That’s another story.
Visiting for a few hours is enough these days. It’s pure, unadulterated nostalgia, for sure, although it’s very much not nostalgia about a better time in my life. It was, I now suspect, a tiny part of my childhood and the main reason I have some feelings for the place is because we never went anywhere else. Everyone I went with died long ago – my old mum was the last of the group to shuffle off her mortal coil and that was over 26 years ago – and, to be blunt, when I go, or when I just look at the webcam, it’s all about me.
I will have to go back soon, probably spending twice as much time travelling there and back as I do in West Bay, but as with the land of my mothers, the Netherlands in general and Rotterdam in particular there is a pull that never goes away. As my time on Earth begins to run out, I need to see as many new places as possible, I still find time for some of the old places. I don’t spend too much time looking back but a little looking back now and then never really hurt anyone, did it?
