In denial about the weather: the best approach to a summer holiday at home

Yesterday was Day Eight of the Hann family’s summer holiday in Northumberland and two-year-old Charlie was simply in denial. “No, not rainy” he announced firmly as I helped him to update the symbols on his stick-on calendar, ignoring the audible evidence of yet another shower stotting off the conservatory roof.

The Boy's is blue, naturally

He would not even concede that it was cloudy, despite the fact that we were eating breakfast with electric lights and heaters going full blast. The worst he would admit was that it might be a little bit windy. “We go beach, build sandcastle,” he asserted, as he has done every day of his vacation without a single new turret arising anywhere along the coast.

Partly because his enthusiasm, like that of Craster our Border terrier, tends to wilt once he gets outdoors and is confronted with the reality of determined precipitation. I once went out with a Westmorland lass for whom driving rain merely added to the joy of hillwalking. “Come on, you won’t melt!” she would announce in the tones of an old-fashioned hospital matron, adding that the dog needed his exercise whatever the weather might throw at us.

Unfortunately the dog did not see it like that, and used to dig his claws into the back doormat when I tried to take him out under inclement conditions, fixing me with a look that clearly said “Have you finally gone completely mad?”

Walks? Who needs them?

To be fair to Northumberland’s reputation as a holiday destination, there was one absolutely glorious day last week that would have been perfect for the beach, if only I hadn’t arranged to spend a large chunk of it in a gastropub in Newcastle with a couple of other elderly men, putting the world to rights.

Then there was the day that would have been bearable if we had wrapped up and invested in a windbreak, plus a Primus stove on which to heat up reviving mugs of tomato soup. (My father always considered this essential kit for our summer excursions to Druridge Bay half a century ago.) But sadly I found myself chained to my desk writing something for a client until it was too late to head for the coast.

I mainly blame Caroline “Jonah” Spelman, the Government’s forestry expert and weather supremo. Have you noticed how it has chucked it down pretty much every day since she stood up in Parliament and officially announced that the country was suffering a drought?

She brought us the wettest drought since records began

All we can do is clutch at small pieces of consolation. There is no need to worry about a ban on garden hoses or automatic car washes. Arriving in Alnwick on Thursday afternoon to find the town centre full of ambulances, we could only share the general relief that torrential rain had kept so many people out of the market place when that car ran out of control.

Perhaps, as you read this, we will finally be out on the sands with our bucket and spade; the forecasters seem to be unanimous that Tuesday is going to be the best day of this week.

And surely things can only improve from the nadir of the local TV news on Sunday night, when the story of a tragic cliff accident in Seahouses was followed by one about a walking party being airlifted off Cheviot, apparently suffering from hypothermia. Mrs Hann fixed me with a beady eye and asked if there was any good news hereabouts.

Well, I observed, there had been no rioters burning down shops in Alnwick or Rothbury, attractive though they might well have found the resulting heat. And I was pretty sure that no one anywhere in Northumberland had yet been attacked by a polar bear. She graciously accepted these points for the defence, though I could sense her thinking that it was surely only a matter of time.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

An old man's strange idea of heaven

Two issues are currently dominating the silly season columns of the national press: the decline of topless sunbathing and the fate of the British pork scratching.

As it happens, I am deeply concerned about both, since after many years of reflection I have concluded that heaven for me would be sitting in a deckchair on a beach, drinking a glass of cool (but not cold) English ale, eating a big bag of pork scratchings and watching a group of underdressed young ladies playing volleyball.

If they could be persuaded to sing a bit of baroque opera at the same time that would be absolute perfection, but I recognise that even paradise has its limits.

Where to find such a heaven on earth? Well, certainly not on Bamburgh beach last Wednesday, when the question was not whether it would be proper to shed the top half of a bikini, but whether to wear one overcoat or two while sheltering behind the windbreak. I had bought toddler Charlie his first bucket and spade in Seahouses, along with one of those little windmills I used to enjoy at his age. I sensed that his first visit to the seaside was not going to be a complete success when the top of his windmill promptly blew off.

So we adopted Plan B and went on a rain-lashed cruise around the Farne Islands, where Mrs Hann hoped to fulfil her lifetime’s ambition of seeing a puffin. If we’d gone last month she could have seen 35,000 of them, apparently. Now there were just two left, floating dozily on the sea and wondering where all their mates had gone. But at least they saved my day from being an unalloyed disaster.

True, Charlie also went “wow” at the grey seals. But then he said “wow” when he found an empty coat hanger in the bottom of our wardrobe this morning, so he may be quite easily impressed.

In short, at the end of four days trying to sell Northumberland as the ultimate holiday paradise, it is only my cunning ruse of allowing my passport to expire that is now keeping us from a beach where the sun might actually shine.

At least I thought the scenery on the Continent might have a point or two in its favour, but I read that the pendulum has swung back (as pendulums always tend to do) and topless sunbathing is increasingly considered outré and indecent. Poor little Charlie. By the time he’s old enough to appreciate that sort of thing, the beach babes will presumably all be shrouded in burkas.

Could it be coincidence that some in the health police are lobbying to mass medicate all milk with added Vitamin D, because we are no longer getting enough of it from sunshine? Which might, of course, be related to the health police’s previous warnings about the dangers of contracting skin cancer.

You can’t win, and I’ll tell you why. Because we’re all going to die of something, whether we follow their well-intentioned advice or not.

So what of those pork scratchings, you ask? Articles are being written elsewhere claiming that the health police are trying to ban them, but my usual extensive research has uncovered only a mild suggestion from the Food Standards Agency, in a pre-World Cup advice leaflet, that fans might like to consider nibbling unsalted peanuts rather than scratchings while watching the match in a pub.

But now someone has been daft enough to raise the subject, no doubt an anti-scratchings campaign will soon be hurtling down the slipway. Clearly the only sound advice about this and any other pleasure is to enjoy it while you can. Just as, with the benefit of hindsight, I now wish I had spent more time on beaches with my uninhibited female friends back in the dear old 1980s.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.