We do like to be beside the seaside… or do we?
These days, most of us are more likely to hop on a budget flight to a foreign clime than consider the coast of our own island for a holiday.
So Mhairi McFarlane spent Saturday night, Sunday morning in Skegness to find out what she’s been missing.
See what the Skegness Standard had to say about her article.

---

I was never taken to the seaside when I was younger. I don’t mean to imply that I’ve risen out of the ashes of a deprived childhood, rather, it just wasn’t what middle-class liberal parents of the last two decades did – or perhaps do.

I’m not one myself yet, so I can’t judge. Before I formulated my own theories, it occurred to me to ask my mother.

“You did go to the seaside!” Did I? “Yes, in Greece, and in Tunisia..” No, mum, the British seaside. “Oh no, of course not. I don’t know why… I suppose it’s become more of a working class thing.”

While this may read as cold hard snobbery in print, it wasn’t what she meant – it just went out of fashion.

The seaside was where my parents had been taken as children in the 1950s, when foreign holidays were not yet an option, because of post-war austerity, expensive air travel and lively suspicion of spicy food. To me, these resorts only existed as a setting for cigarette-card sized black-and-white pictures of my mum as a girl with a ribbon in her hair, sitting on a donkey in Filey.

Or my uncle as a little boy in shorts, scratchy sweater stretched over round stomach, clutching an ice cream cone. When they grew up, they found better places to take a break, where waters were warmer.

“Your grandfather was so mean he wouldn’t have taken us abroad anyway,” my mum pointed out.Perhaps that’s enough of a paddle in family history.

All of this can help explain why I’ve ended up part of a landlubber generation, better acquainted with the Spanish coastline than the one fifty or so miles away.

When I was given the assignment of taking a trip to Skegness, at least I wasn’t going to be blinded by the prejudice of prior experience.

On other holidays, I’d hop in the car and get my passenger-navigator to wrestle with the road atlas and one of those tins of sweets in icing sugar. On this occasion, I felt it should be the authentic ‘day out’ experience – by rail.

It was my first mistake.

On the weekend I chose, the Evening Post was announcing anger at a hike in fares between Nottingham and Skegness, and having sampled the service, I can see why.

It was around £36 for two people on the boneshaker to Lincolnshire, the journey taking longer than it would to get to London – over two hours, with inexplicable, sluggish fag stops at places like Grantham.

As my francophobe stepfather likes to say about France: ‘In the time it takes to get there, you could have gone somewhere good.’

Our fellow travellers were another culture shock. On the station platform, I mistakenly joined the people waiting for the Manchester train.

Students, professional couples, young families… a colourful, ordinary variety.

My boyfriend tapped me on the shoulder and pointed out where we should be.

As the crowd parted, I saw the Skeggy contingent: lots more grey hair and quite a few downcast expressions.

I’d always taken the word ‘cosmopolitan’ for granted when applied to the city I live in, meaning nothing more than being able to get a cappuccino.

Not for the first time during my visit to Skegness, I got a whiff of how old-fashioned coastal towns can be – a whisk in a time machine back to an England that doesn’t exist anymore on the middle of the mainland.

After the long and creaking train ride, with a soundtrack of old ladies working their way through puzzle books with their shouty seven-year-old grandchildren, punctuated by ringtone tunes, we were there.On the platform, my boyfriend disappeared. I discovered him peering at the timetable for departures.

“I want to check what time we can get away tomorrow,” he said, somewhat unenthusiastically.

At Skegness station, they’d have a laugh at you if you asked for frothy continental coffees.

The day’s arrivals and departures are still chalked up on a blackboard, the nearest place to buy a newspaper is Safeway supermarket down the road, and prices in the shop are advertised in marker pen on bright orange and green stars of cardboard, stapled along the shelf behind the till.

Booked into a seafront hotel, we decided to walk and take in the sights along the way.

My two first impressions are scribbled in shorthand in my notebook.

‘Man with wispy bald patches sat on bench eating KFC. Woman mummified in blankets, with poodle perched on her knee.’

The glamour of the Cote d’Azur it ain’t. Though strangely, there’s a painting of a scene in southern France decorating the train station.

“Are they trying to torment us?” said my still-cynical other half. The offices of the local paper, the Skegness Target, are nearby, along with Colonel Sanders’ chicken restaurant and ‘Wingnuts Cafe’.

The tree-lined streets we walk along to the seafront are pretty, yet the shops are a surprise. I’ve obviously grown used to the fashionable high street selection in Nottingham.

A clothes store seems knowingly titled as ‘The Last Resort’ and there’s a surfeit of tourist-tat outlets.

Even good old Marks and Sparks only seems to stock knife-pleat navy skirts and trousers with elasticated waists.

In short, if you wanted to buy a decent suit in Skeggy you’d be in trouble. But if you wanted a figurine of a large-breasted mermaid or a frosted table lamp in the shape of an Olympic torch, you’d be spoilt for choice.

Worryingly, another shop sells a rare one-off – the thermal thong. Surely there’s a contradiction there?

A green-and-cream open-top tour bus emblazoned with the slogan It’s So Bracing! trundles by, carrying a lone passenger.

There’s a swarm of skinheads in town this weekend, chatting with pints of lager in hand as they wait to hear a band at a local pub. Tour equipment has the words ‘Lip Up Fatty’ painted on it. Eighties ska band Bad Manners? Bad Manners tribute act?

“Mansfield-on-sea,” observes my boyfriend. “Or Blackpool looked at through the wrong end of a telescope.”

He’s point-blank refusing to get in the party mood…

Something bothers me, something different that I can’t quite pinpoint. Then I realise it’s the sheer number of people smoking.

All ages, too – grannies with no tights, ankle tattoos and a gasper hanging from their lips.

There are a lot of families, three generations all wandering around together, licking lollies.

As you get nearer the ocean, the number of kiosks framed by livid pink sweeties and plastic cones of candyfloss multiply, also selling ice creams with the option of flakes and the exotic-sounding ‘rainbow dips’ – a quick roll in hundreds and thousands.

And, of course, dangling bags of the famous rock, which you can get in various creative varieties, including the booze pack I bought: rum, champagne, beer…

There’s the smell of fried onions in the air and the distant bleep-bleeps and alien spaceship explosion sound effects from the amusement arcades.

Dark, cavernous places, filled with milky-pale tracksuit-clad teenagers you can just pick out in the gloom.

A popular pastime seems to be a ‘disco’ game where you jump on squares as they light up.

Pairs of girls stand side-by-side, staring at screens straight ahead and purposefully stepping in time with the perfect choreography of the seriously well practiced.

We find our hotel on the main drag along the beach, standing out with its bright egg-yolk yellow and white frontage.

All along the street, coach drivers are unloading luggage on the pavement.

(For the first time I find myself wondering – why do all coach drivers wear grey polyester slacks with creases down the front?
)

The hotel is the classic British holiday resort establishment: less than effusive service – key, room number, breakfast starts at seven and the lift’s over there.

The lift causes some amusement. It’s like standing in a wardrobe while it’s winched upwards on a rope.

Not sure how people with large suitcases manage, but we certainly didn’t spot any liveried porters dashing about.

For an early evening drink, the options are limited. Skegness seems to be full of the pounding-music, crackling neon-light sign kind of places that sell everything in bottles.

Back at the hotel, we can drink in the lounge, and this appears the best option.

Due to the average age of the guests, however, and the decor, it’s like being round at someone else’s grandparents.

In one corner, two middle-aged women play cards, drink gin and orange and ignore Chris Tarrant smirking his way through Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? on mute on the television behind them.

At the other end of the thickly-carpeted room, three chainsmokers play the world’s quietest game of darts.(When we come down for breakfast in the morning, they’re all still there, surrounded by the blue-grey haze.)

Later we sample chips on the promenade, where donkey rides have finished for the day, we decide not to join the solo figure flying a kite in front of the grey slab of sea. Instead, we head for the Pleasure Beach, a brilliant misnomer for the sight that greets us.

A small gang of morose-looking lads with fluffy moustaches and white baseball caps are waiting for the umbrella ride to fill up sufficiently so it can start.

The song Don’t Mess With My Toot Toot is blaring out.

I turn to look at the horrified expression on my boyfriend’s face.

As Jack Davenport says on the Mastercard adverts – priceless.

The atmosphere of the place at a quiet teatime, rain starting to splatter down, feels very post-holiday season, even on a Bank Holiday weekend.

There’s just a few stragglers hanging around, kids who don’t want to go home, families killing time before their trains.

We enjoy the age-old frustration of the ‘picking a cuddly toy up with a metal claw’ game, where the pincers open to drop it again.

There’s also an amusing disparity between the prizes lined up on view and the ones you might win…the Incredible Hulks littering the bottom of one glass cabinet look more like sick Berts from Sesame Street.

Perhaps it was the sugar rush from all the rock, but such crude deceptions start to be endearing.

There are universal similarities to fairgrounds – on the dodgems, the operators still have greased down tramline haircuts and jump on and off the back of the cars.

The Ghost Train was an amusing nadir among the attractions, every bit as bad as the memories of many Goose Fairs.

We lurched past unconvincing dangling papier-mache corpses, to tape-recorded screams and wails, until encountering the piece de resistance – an Egyptian mummy’s tomb, which snapped open so an inexplicably topless woman’s bloodied ‘corpse’ could limply hang out of it for a moment. Our trip of terror was rather overpriced at £1.50.

Lastly, we go for a ride on the Big Wheel. When we get to the top, the view stretches for miles across the flat Lincolnshire landscape. On one side is urban sprawl, neglected rooftops and the new seafront McDonald’s, which we passed earlier, tills and tables still in bubblewrap.

In the other direction, the white tents of Butlins, a holiday destination which gets the same snickering from the chattering classes as Skeggy.

The cold slate-coloured sea stretches away to the horizon.

We’re near nature, but it’s the artifice of everything – fluorescent food, flashing lights, sunlight-free fruit machine-filled dens and dark drinking holes – that has been the most striking thing about Skegness.

Yet viewed from the top of the Big Wheel, it all seems so peaceful.

“I feel sick,” says my boyfriend.

Do you have a story about the regional press? Ring 0116 227 3122/3121, or
e-mail [email protected]