After months of being cooped up, Rachel Cooke is looking forward to a British seaside holiday like the ones from her childhood – but with fewer hard-boiled eggs
When I was 12, or thereabouts, my granny took me, my brother and my sister to the seaside for the week. For her, this was a great treat; a widow since before we were born, she loved to be with us, and she loved the feeling she was treating us. But we were perhaps a bit more ambivalent. Our treat came with… complications. Granny was blind, and new places were tricky for her (not that she’d ever admit it). Additionally, she was a terrible snorer. In a holiday park chalet only twice as big as a bus shelter, the chances of us getting a decent night’s sleep – or any sleep at all – were slimmer than a Wham bar (original raspberry flavour).
But we’ll come back to Wham bars. The point is that we went to Withernsea, in the East Riding of Yorkshire. This was not a glamorous place. At the time, I’d barely heard of it – why, I wondered, couldn’t we go to Bridlington? – and in the decades since, I’ve never met a single other person who has ever been to the town, let alone stayed there for a whole week. Google it, and you’ll find that its greatest claim to fame is the fact that it’s the birthplace of the actress Kay Kendall– and who’s heard of her, these days? (Please don’t write in; I adore Kay Kendall, though perhaps not quite enough to visit Withernsea’s lighthouse, which now houses an exhibition devoted to her.) But I digress. No, Withernsea, was not glamorous. On the first day, I gazed out at the gunmetal North Sea, and thought sulkily of those friends lucky enough to be taken to Spain. God, life was so unfair.
Those chilly, haphazard days, are the British holiday in microcosm: its absolute crumminess; its ineffable perfection
We will want the foods of our pasts, soothing and slightly comical and mostly happily inexpensive
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