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Seaside


Gus Mears

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It's above 18 degrees outside, so naturally many people will be pulling on shorts to reveal matchstick legs, laughing at oncologists by not wearing sun cream and piling their car full of pointless shit like windbreaks. Yes, it's time to go down the sea.

What are your favourite seaside memories and do you have a favourite beach? Why? Are you going to one this fine bank holiday weekend? Are you one of the sociopaths who doesn't appreciate a Cider Refresher? All of that jazz. 

Woolacombe Bay in Devon is my go to. Have been going there since I was a child and still do once a year. It's majestic and delightfully unspoiled by not being connected to a huge city. Looks out onto the Atlantic and occasionally has the dribble of piss that constitutes as good UK surf. Top memories of nearly drowning when I was three and my Aunt almost punching a teenager who had the gall to kick the sand penguin I'd spent all day making. 

Sandbanks in Pool/Bournemouth is also nice. Once got third degree burns on my legs there after not realising the suncream wasn't waterproof like a total melon. I have also had good memories of the beach, it's just the getting burned/almost killed linger in the mind more. Eating massive amounts of Wonkalate (rasberry flavoured chocolate with Nerds in) and buying fish and chips form the place that always played Cotton-Eye Joe and Go West on rotation, they were good. 

Weston Super-Mare is fucking awful. 

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Lucky enough to live within an hour of several decent little resorts. Scarborough, Bridlington and Cleethorpes as well as a load of beaches without much of a town attached. I prefer going to the seaside for the sun, the arcades and the fish and chips rather than the beach particularly. Scarborough is great for that. However, if I am in a beachy mood, I prefer to go to Mappleton. It's a great beach and is excellent for the kids to look for stones and fossils. Sadly, the village itself is falling into the sea at a rapid rate.

I remember when I was about 9 or 10 going to Fraisthorpe. There's a nudist section. I went with my friends family and there was a woman sunbathing topless along the beach. My mate kicked the ball near her and shouted "I'll get it". His Dad said "You bloody won't, I'll get it". His Mum said "Ahem, you bloody won't either.". I got to get the ball. What a pair of tits. Hers, not my mate and his Dad.

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As a kid growing up in The Mumbles, I was spoiled for choice.  Caswell was the most visited, but Langland & Rotherslade also had their fair share of Honcho.  Some great stories from Oystermouth Castle grounds too ... :D  #sigh #nostalgia

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Sandbanks? Gus you ponce.

I spent most of my summer holiday in the West Country when I was a kid/teenager, but I'm absolutely useless at remembering which towns we stayed at, visited etc. I do remember really enjoying the beaches at St Ives (Cornwall) and Dawlish Warren (south Devon). The beaches in Cornwall and Devon are usually bloody beautiful, with coves along the front which are great for catching crabs. I love that part of the country. I have definitely been to Woolacombe Bay, but I can't remember which one it is- so many of the beaches there blur into one. You used to get plenty of topless sunbathers in the West and as a young teenager this often caused problems of slight 'balooning' of the shorts.

Isle of Wight has some decent beaches, Sandown and Ryde for example. The south east coast is pretty disappointing- far too many pebble beaches. Fuck the pebble beaches, what a waste of a beach. Shame, because the towns are usually nice along that stretch. The beaches in Norfolk are nice and many of them are very unspoiled. Shame it's always windy as fuck over there, though.

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My parents live a five minute walk from the beach on the south coast. We moved to that house when I was 15 and it was amazing then, I went swimming every day in the summer and would camp out there with friends in my teenage years. Like all things though, the novelty wore off sometime in my early twenties. Swimming in the sea is shite, as are jagged pebbles (West Wittering beach wasn't far though, lovely sand). When the weather's nice it's full of twats. Changes to local flood defences also meant that the walk along the beach to Selsey where a lot of my friends lived became impossible and I had to get 2 buses instead. By the time I moved away from home I probably hadn't set foot on the beach in 3 years. I'm visiting this weekend, I think I might make the 5 minute walk.    

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35 minutes ago, Gus Mears said:

Weston Super-Mare is fucking awful. 

Try Burnham-on-Sea just down the road and Weston'll feel like paradise in comparison. It's on that same stretch of 'coast' that's actually just an estuary, except here we have worse views of Steepholm, better ones of Hinkley Point... and somehow even filthier water. There isn't even much to do for the trickle of (mostly) Brummie and South Walian tourists who start to turn up at this time of year. We have the shortest proper pier here, since Wigan shouldn't really count as it's even further from the real seaside.

As a kid I went to Swanage most often for holidays and always enjoyed it. The family took me to Cornwall quite a bit too, but never to the same part more than once. I liked living in Eastbourne a couple of years ago but as PunkStep says, a pebble beach like the ones all along that stretch of coast really isn't up to much. Had some great times at the bandstand there though.

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Grew up on the narrow part of a peninsula, so was surrounded by sea & beach options all my life. https://goo.gl/maps/Guk3yN3bJur

Burrow Beach was our main beach growing up because we could walk there as kids. Good times. Portmarnock beach was a 5 min bus ride away and had bigger waves though. So sometimes we'd grab 50p and go there instead.

 

 

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Mon Choisy, Mauritius. One of the finest beaches in the world.

Powder sand, clear water for snorkelling with lots of multi-coloured fish, never too many people. Only downside is lots of philao seeds (kind of mini pine cones from those trees pictured) in the sand near the grassline, which jab your feet when barefoot.

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1 hour ago, Fog Dude said:

Try Burnham-on-Sea just down the road and Weston'll feel like paradise in comparison.

pfft! Birmingham on Seais ace, far better than Western. There's at least two good pubs, one of the chip shops is good, there's that ace food festival thing that they have twice a year.... err..... yes the beach is crap but I hate beaches and have done since I cut my toe on a broken glass in Bournemouth when I was 7. The way they make a feature out of the mini pier is like something out of the League of Gentlemen.

 

The best thing about Western was that time we went to see Chas & Dave and Chas said "ere, where do you lot go on holiday?" and my wife shouted "Western Super Mare" so Chas altered Margate to Western Super Mare for the whole song. he didn't shorten it to Western which would have fit easier, he sang "daaaarn to Western Super Mare" every time. I bloody love Chas.

 

oh and when I was little we went to Broadstairs, just across from Margate, from memory it was a bit nicer, a lot of stuff about Dickens.

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20 minutes ago, PunkStep said:

Oh behave @Carbomb, you can't wade into a conversation where Weston-Super-Mare and Swanage are discussed and just casually drop a picture of paradise from an exotic island in the Indian Ocean! That's cheating!

Hahaha, sorry.

If it helps, I think Cornwall and Devon have some of the most gorgeous beaches I've ever seen, and I'm not just saying that. There are some down there that, if you were to see photos without any context, you might think they were somewhere in the Mediterranean.

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As a kid, I spent most of my summer holidays in shitty caravan parks on the UK coast. I had assumed that they were always in the south west; Torquay, Newquay, Bude, St Ives, etc. A couple of times on the Isle of Wight. But you can imagine my surprise when I looked on a map as an adult and discovered that Great Yarmouth is all the way over the other side of the country next to Norwich.

I assume it must have been cheaper to stay at these places because we lived in Essex so I have no idea why we never went to anywhere on the south coast or even any of the coastal towns in Kent. Maybe, to my mum, these towns didn't feel far enough away. As someone who'd travelled a lot and met my dad in Hong Kong before getting anchored down by me, perhaps she wished we could get away further and the beaches of Devon and Cornwall felt that little bit more exotic.

They were all much of a muchness. I lived in Southend as a until I was 4 and still went back fairly regularly until my early teens so I had the seaside amusements and hot donuts effectively on my doorstep. After we moved to Grays from Southend, we lived on the bank of the Thames which even had a beach so that satisfied my childhood love of paddling and looking for nice pebbles on sunny days. Although, in retrospect, I should have probably been told not to go paddling on Grays beach...

Anyway, because I didn't know a foreign beach until I was a teenager, I had no idea that I was missing out on anything. We never did Butlins or Pontins any of the big organisers but I remember taking part in fancy dress competitions and sack races and making friends with other children who I kept in touch with as pen pals for a month or two until I realised that I was more than likely never going to see these people again and lost interest.

Since moving to Cardiff, I've had the opportunity to discover the beaches of South Wales and, to be honest, they're incredible. From camping at various beaches on the Gower to days out on Barry, Southerndown, Porthcawl, etc, and that one year that Beach Break was in Carmarthen and got blasted with tropical sunshine for a few days, there's some amazing beaches within an or two of my house.

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