Tag Archives: beach

Flock the haters: seagulls are amazing

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I sometimes think I’m the only person in the world who likes seagulls. As a species they appear to be significantly less popular than crabs: all three kinds (snap-snap; itch-itch; and bitch-bitch). I’d go so far as to say they’re probably less popular than an endless loop of Mrs Brown Boys playing on a big screen on the express shuttle-bus service to hell, which never actually reaches hell, and you’re just stuck on a dangerously hot bus watching the same episode of Mrs Browns’ Boys over and over for all eternity, and then after about 400,000 years the penny drops and you’re like, ‘Ah, I see what they feckin’ did there, sure. Well played, Beelzebub. Well played.’

I’ve never heard anyone say anything nice about seagulls. Not once. Ever. ‘Rats with wings’ is about as complimentary as it gets. It’s a shame. They don’t deserve the bad rap they get, bless their ketchup-covered beaks. It’s not their fault we humans leave trails of Happy Meals and chip wrappers from our shores to our town centres. If anyone’s to blame for the unhappy legions of wee dogs and old ladies being dive-bombed with hilarious regularity it’s us. Mankind: we merry band of muckle, messy, bipedal bastards.

Seagulls help more than they hinder. They provide us with an incredible public service, completely tax free, by eating our rubbish and left-overs. That’s really nice of them, isn’t it? I mean, otters are pretty good, I mean, they’re perfectly fine, but they aren’t nipping down the shops for a pint of milk or tidying our kitchens for us, are they? Snobs, that’s what they are. Semiaquatic wankers.

Maybe it’s just me (it’s definitely just me) but I find seagulls soothing. Their soaring shrieks and laugh-like ululations – which tend to inspire nothing but murderous rage in most of my contemporaries – are a panacea for my soul. Whenever I hear their cries I’m able to imagine I’m sitting on a remote beach somewhere; the vastness of the ocean at my feet; the warm breath of the wind lowing gently against my face; the cold comfort of the sand: a man with nothing to do except nothing at all, and all the happier for it.

They cheer me up and make me laugh, too. There’s something intrinsically comical about them. I love the juxtaposition between the serious tones of their faces and the Charlie Chaplin-icity of their bodies, all prat-falls and clownish gait. The sight of a seagull dancing up and down on a patch of grass to coax gullible worms to the surface, legs lifting up and down like malfunctioning pistons, is one of the funniest things you’ll ever see, with the possible exception of Jeremy Corbin dressed as a wizard shouting obscenities at his own penis. When a seagull dashes along a road, its little legs thumping and bicycling beneath its spirit-level-straight body, it’s hard not to imagine their journey being accompanied by the old-timey piano music from ‘silent’ movies.

They’re such adorably silly, sweet and absurd little creatures. Who would wish death upon them? Well, everyone, it seems. Every single man, woman and child on earth. Except me. Most people want to hurt seagulls: force-feed them bicarbonate of soda until their tummies pop like fireworks; or squish them into the ground like guts-flavoured chewing gum; or strap a crocodile to the underside of a helicopter-sized drone and fly it through their flocks like a hungry lawnmower.

My wife wants to kill them, too; no more so than when I arrive home from work with my car stained so severely with poop splat that it looks like the recipient of the world’s largest and most grotesque scat-bukkake. Seagulls come to roost on the roof of my work, you see. For a third to a half of every year, the air around my office is a riot of squawks and shrieks and over-lapping choruses of Mongolian throat-singing, seagull-style. They thump on the skylights with their beaks. They flap and swoop over the car-park like hawks above a field of mice. They shit on people’s heads – sometimes straight into people’s eyes.

I miss them when they go. Especially the eye-shitting part. That’s hilarious.

My wife won’t be swayed from her hatred, though, no matter how much I talk up their quirks. She wants them dead. How dare they shit on our car! How dare they rob what little status or value our little chrome junk-mobile possesses with their corrosive, paint-peeling sky-jobbies? She sometimes asks me to park in the car-park of a neighbouring workplace, and walk the rest of the way to my office from there, in order to protect the car’s integrity, an offer I’ve always, em, politely declined.

I want my wife to love the gulls as much as I do. Why let a little thing like repeated airborne excretions ruin the chance of a perfectly good inter-species friendship? I wish she’d let them into her heart. When we lived in our last home, a third-floor flat, I’d begin every weekend morning by standing on the balcony in my dressing gown, hurling chunks of bread into the sky, and watching as the gulls swooped and dipped and whooshed to catch them as they fell ground-wards; my own private aerial display team. Why couldn’t she love them for that, if nothing else? In the better weather, she’s watched me place bread on my head and shoulders and walk around like some God of the seagulls, sometimes with four of them perched on me at once. She liked that, mind you, but only because one of them shat on my shoulder.

PS: I know there are hundreds of different species of gulls, and seagull isn’t a particularly precise or accurate catch-all label to throw around, but equally I don’t care.

Like all relationships, ours has been tested. The relationship between me and the seagulls, that is. I know the brutality my winged homies are capable of demonstrating. I’m still haunted by memories of the time I witnessed their inhumanity close-up – though I suppose I can’t really judge seagulls too harshly for not possessing humanity, given that they’re seagulls. You know what I mean. In my own defence, inseagullity just sounded daft.

I used to work at the airport, a long time ago now. One afternoon at the end of a shift I was in my car about to pull out of the staff car-park when I saw a couple of seagulls a-strutting-and-a-pecking at a nearby patch of grass, intermittently stopping to squabble with, and viciously peck at, each other. I laughed. Those guys! It was like having private access to Laurel and Hardy, if, you know, Laurel and Hardy had been seagulls. What were they doing, I wondered? I’d never seen them exhibiting this sort of behaviour before. I killed the engine, unclipped my seat-belt and craned my neck to get a better look at them through the windscreen. They were still just out of view, so I got out the car and took a step towards them. Then another step. Then another. And another.

Then horror. Such heart-rending horror.

The seagulls were ripping and tearing at the ears, face and body of a stunned and quivering baby rabbit. What a blow; what cruel disillusionment. It was like finding out your gentle and loving wee gran was secretly a werewolf who’d eaten half your friends. Or chasing Laurel and Hardy into an alleyway for their autograph only to find them beating a baby to death with a set of golf clubs. Not exactly up there with the top ten best laughs of all time.

I ran towards those asshole seagulls, shouting and shooing as I closed on them. They weren’t keen on abandoning their day’s sport, and for just a brief second seemed intent on playing a game of chicken with the big angry human. At the very last moment, though, they flapped off in a huff.

The poor little rabbit was wide-eyed and trembling, its chest rising and falling and vibrating with worrying urgency. It put up no resistance when I softly stroked its fur. That’s how you know a rabbit’s terrified. Usually, the mere suggestion of a human footstep is enough to have them leaping hedgerows like showjumping stallions. I took my phone out and called the airport’s on-site animal welfare/RSPCA team, and maintained a vigil until they came to take the little fella away and tend to his shock. I don’t know what happened to the rabbit after that. I told them never to tell me. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

I was angry at seagull-kind for a few hours, but you can’t really hold a grudge against them. Besides, we humans are capable of much, much worse. My own step-dad used to pop rabbits with a pellet gun through his bedroom window, and then run out to the garden to break their necks, or smash their heads against a rock, all because they ate his petunias or disrespected his mother or wore white socks with black shoes or something. We had a garage full of domesticated rabbits when I was a boy, which my step-dad used to breed, and sometimes enter into shows. Unbeknownst to all of us, he was also selling a proportion of those rabbits to a local French bistro. And not to keep as pets. When my mum found out, they were liberated from their death-warehouse and re-homed quicker than you could say ‘Arrete de tuer ces lapins, chatte!’

Anyway, hating fully-grown seagulls is one thing, but their children? How can you detest the baby versions of any warm-blooded animal (with the possible exception of the Trumps)? Every July the roof of my work becomes a creche, where gangly, grey-feathered chicks teeter on the corrugated metal slats, and take their first, uncertain forays into flight. I become a mother hen when I’m around them, always shouting up at them things like ‘Careful up there, now’ and ‘What have I told you?!’ and ‘You treat this roof like a hotel!’

Inevitably, every year a handful of young gulls fall from the roof and find themselves trapped at ground level, away from their mothers and unable to fly back to them. They’re vulnerable on the ground. If a truck or a forklift doesn’t get them, come nightfall, a hungry fox will. I’ve chased chicks around that car-park many times, Benny-Hill-style, desperately trying to get them up a ladder and back on to the roof. I’ve put down water for them, thrown scraps of food. Once, I even tried to get one to hop into my car so I could take it home and raise it as my own. You know what I mean: give it a pipe and call it Gerald, inculcate in it a love of the classics and fine port. Normal stuff. It’s lucky I couldn’t persuade the little fella to become little Jamie Junior, because my wife would’ve thrown us both out on the street.

A few weeks ago my wife, kids and I took a boat trip out to a tiny island in the firth of forth. Getting there was stressful. I should clarify: getting to the boat was stressful. We hadn’t known that South Queensferry, from where we were sailing, was hosting a charity abseil that day. I got us to the town with twenty-five minutes to spare. After twenty-five minutes of driving up and down a half-mile of street yelling and spitting venom (‘I HOPE THEIR NEXT F***ING ABSEIL’S IN HELL!’) my wife and I decided it would be better for our collective sanity if we just cut our losses (THIRTY QUID!) and drove home. Just as I was dawdling the car up the road at almost precisely two minutes to sailing time, I passed a space. SCREECH! SWEAR! ROAR! BADLY PARK! RUN RUN RUN! I hate running at the best of times. I especially hate running whilst carrying a four-year-old child. We could see our fellow passengers boarding the boat in the distance. We ran, ran, ran. My lungs almost exploded, I was panting like a sex criminal, but we made it. Just.

But we made it.

There’s an old abbey on the island, which we dutifully explored. Then we crossed the island to a rocky beach, where there were no people but us, and untold hundreds of seagulls. They circled in whirlpools above the sea. They rolled over the beach in grey-and-white waves. Everywhere we looked they perched, sat, frolicked and strolled, like flocks of feathered families holidaying at the seaside. We were the real tourists. This was their land. And we were welcome there. Or at least tolerated. I closed my eyes, and I could imagine that I was exactly where I was. On an empty beach full of shrieks and whispers. Surrounded by wind and seagulls. In the warm glow of my family.

On Holiday in the Past

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From when I was a boy up until I was a teenager we used to go on family camping holidays to France. Not the awful kind, where you have to erect and sleep in your own tent that’s the same size and shape as a coffin, eat cold beans, and shit in a bush, but the plush kind: the ‘you’re not staying in a hotel but at least you’re not sleeping directly on the ground with insects crawling over your eyes’ kind of camping holiday.

We always booked into managed campsites and stayed in ready-made tents; none of that free-range, find-a-pitch caper for us. We never hired the caravans or mobile homes because a) my step-dad fancied himself as something of an outdoorsman, and b) we were a family unit of 4 kids and 2 adults, so staying in a caravan would’ve been pretty expensive. Never forgetting c) in actual fact, even if we’d been millionaires we still would’ve stayed in a tent, because my step-dad likes to give away money like Israel likes to give away land.

My step-dad would also risk everything to get his hands on free stuff, even if he had no real use for the free stuff once he got it. Perhaps more accurately, he would ask someone else to risk everything to get his hands on free stuff. We always drove to our campsites: covered the length of the UK, stopped off in Plymouth for the night, boarded a ferry the next morning, and continued down through the French countryside, past fields, forests and vineyards. My step-dad once ordered my older sister into a vineyard to steal grapes. She filled two great big bin-liners full of them as he watched from the car like a mob boss. She came back panting, anxious and etched with scrapes, only for a week or so later to have her sacrifice rendered meaningless when the half-squished, spoiled grapes were simply thrown in the bin.

The tents we stayed in on the campsites were large enough that you could comfortably stand up in them, maybe even do a few vigorous bunny hops without grazing your scalp. They were essentially tiny canvas cottages, with three separate bedroom compartments – each with a raised camp-bed – and a communal living area featuring a stove, a fridge, and table and chairs. Shower and toilet blocks were dotted all around the campsite, meaning that comfort – or something very loosely approximating it – was never far away. I say ‘loosely approximating’ because most of the available toilets were just big holes in the ground that you had to squat over and shit in like you were in Auchswitz or something. Thanks, the French.

We usually chose campsites that were close to the beach. This allowed us to treat continental Europe to our own unique version of trooping the colours: we’d stand in the sand and become walking, talking, biological British flags as our Scottish skins burned in the sun, turning from blue to white to deep red.

Unbeknownst to my mum – or so she says, anyway – one time we found ourselves on a nudist beach: a big sand-box filled with wrinkled, withered ball-bags, big wrecking-ball bosoms and sun-ripened gunts. They’re never sexy places, are they?

I was a young lad of five or so, at an age where the words ‘socks’ and ‘bums’ could make me laugh until I puked, so my mum was mightily impressed that I didn’t seem bothered by the explosion of nakedness around me. I scarcely seemed to notice it at all, even when I was standing at the ice-cream kiosk handing over my francs with a big French willy dangling at either side of my head like a pair of droopy ear-rings.

The realisation that there was a garden of flesh surrounding me seemed to slap me in the face all of a sudden and out of nowhere, although thankfully nothing literally slapped me in the face. I must’ve been like the cop working out who Kaiser Soze was at the end of The Usual Suspects.

“Boobies!” I boomed out at the top of my little voice as my eyes jumped around the beach, “BOOBIES! BOOBIES EVERYWHERE!”

My mum said she had to clamp a hand across my mouth and carry me across the beach like a kidnap victim.

“MMOOOMIIES” I shouted into the palm of her hand.

Speaking of kidnapping… another time we were all sitting on a beach munching chocolate-filled croissants when a little waif of a kid, all tan and sinew, crept over to us and muttered a few plaintive words in French.

“What?” my Mum asked him. Without waiting for a response, she threw her hands out as if to shoo all of us back, even though we were sitting quietly in a circle and only moving our mouths. “Let him through, everyone, let him through, come on, son, come on, come over here and sit down.”

She beckoned him over with frantically flapping hands and then patted the sand next to her. He sat down, but slowly, uncertainly, reluctantly, like he wasn’t sure if there were snipers camped in the long grass. He looked around at us as if to say, ‘So you’re my new family now, huh? Jesus Christ…’

He would’ve been even more terrified had he known my mum’s reputation as an ever-so-slightly more benign version of the Child Snatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. She’s always had a thing for unofficially adopting children, writing the contracts with her eyes and signing them with her heart. A child only has to look at her, and within five seconds she’ll have said something like, ‘Poor wee guy. I’ll bet he wishes I was his mum.’

The wee French boy said something again. My mum picked up a croissant and shoved it in his hand. “Poor wee bugger’s starving, look at him, he’s famished. EAT IT SON,” she commanded. He stared at it for a second. She jabbed a finger from him to the croissant and back again. “YOU. EAT?”

He didn’t really have a choice, so he started to eat.

“There, that’s good, isn’t it, son?” said my mum.

Like most people in the UK, my mum was sure that she could overcome any language barrier by loudly infantilising whomever she was talking to in pigeon-English, most of the time speaking to them as if they were a deaf pensioner. “Is that yummy? Yu-mmee? I… SAID… IS… THAT YU-MEEE, SON? (rubs tummy) Mmmmmmmm. YUMMY FOOD.”

The boy sat, taking tiny bites from the end of the croissant, never taking his eyes off of us for a second. A look of cowed reluctance settled over his face, suggestive of a naughty dog at the dinner table. Each time he swallowed, my mum’s face lit up like she’d just been told she was a grandmother.

She prompted us to give him more encouragement, which resulted in us giving him a big cheer whenever he ingested a particularly large piece of pastry. He welcomed the first cheer into his synapses like it was a gun-shot at close quarters, almost chucking the croissant into the sand with fright.

“YOU JUST KEEP EATING, SON, THAT’S IT.”

A lady appeared behind my mum’s shoulder and said in English with a heavy French accent: ‘Em, excuse me.’

We looked up at her. She said something else in French to the boy who instantly scrambled to her side, a look of boundless relief and gratitude painted over his eyes. My mum scrutinised the French woman, demanding answers with her eyes.

“He, eh,” said the French lady, “He just want to know ze time.”

We all laughed, but I could tell that the French boy was one step away from full-blown PTSD. My mum looked miffed. I imagined her as a Bond villain, angrily slamming her fist down on the control-room table. “Curses! One more minute and the boy would have been mine!”

It makes me very sad that I’ll never go on one of these holidays again – at least not with the same cast – but I’m pretty sure the French must be breathing a mighty, collective sigh of relief.

THE END.

CLARIFICATIONS

My parents enjoyed reading this article, but in talking with them about it and reminiscing about our holidays in general I discovered that I had mis-remembered some of the finer details. Some of this is probably down to the passage of time and how young I was when most of this happened, some of it is probably due to my writer’s brain deciding that my version of events made for a slightly better story, but in any case my parents (whose version isn’t necessarily any more reliable) offered these corrections:

  • We weren’t eating chocolate croissants on the beach. They were pastry things filled with custard.
  • We all tried to get the wee French boy to eat our pastries, not just my mum
  • At the nudist beach – when I had penises at either side of my head – I was waiting in line for chips, not ice-cream
  • I shouted ‘BARE NAKED LADIES EVERYWHERE!’ on the nudist beach, not ‘BOOBIES’.
  • We actually did stay in a caravan the first couple of times we went on holiday to France, but I must’ve been too young to remember

Where there was absolutely no disagreement, however, was on the subject of my step-dad being a tight bastard. Even my step-dad readily agreed.

Sun, Sea, Sand… and Stabbings

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When we think about long, warm, sunny weekends and bank-holidays at the beach, we can’t help but imagine lilos, sun-tans and sand-castles; deck-chairs, donkeys and ice-creams; and, of course, a massive police presence, and an ugly, oppressive air of horror and trepidation….

Wait a minute… what?

Perhaps I should clarify: I’m talking specifically about sunny days on a Scottish beach.

Ah, now it all makes sense.

During our recent spell of good weather (which at the time of writing is still ongoing – I don’t know who’s been sacrificing children to Ra the Sun God, but whoever it is, please don’t stop) our family headed east-to-west for a day out at Troon’s South Beach. If you’ve never been to South Beach before, I can assure you that it doesn’t invite any comparisons whatsoever with Florida, save for the high number of Goofy bastards milling around.

It was 26 degrees. The sun was fierce, the sand hot to the touch, but the beach itself was calm and peaceful. A light, balmy breeze caressed the assembled sun-worshippers, some of whom were skipping, some slouching, some splashing, but all of them just enjoying the day without kicking sand – literally or metaphorically – in anyone else’s face. We were happy to join them.

It helped that we’d chosen the section of the beach farthest from the town itself, which we could see curving and fading into the distance along the coastline, with its gaudy amusements and hellish postcard pomp. It wasn’t all good news: being so far away from ‘civilisation’ meant that we were outwith comfortable walking distance (and within uncomfortable melting distance) of the nearest available ice-cream. That was the price we had to pay for peace; the cross we had to bear, and, yes,I have just indirectly compared our suffering to that of Jesus Christ’s – another saintly man who was cruelly deprived of ice cream on a really hot day.

Anyway, our kids loved their time at South Beach. It was a picture-perfect, peaceful day, but not without its oddities. For instance, the policemen and -women who kept popping their heads up over the dunes for a little look-see every now and again, like illuminous meerkats. Or the heavy police presence in general. Or the mounted officers clomping their horses up and down the streets that ran parallel to the beach.

We didn’t understand it until we got home later that afternoon and learned that we’d arrived on South Beach one day before the one-year anniversary of the occasion when 6000 teenagers from all along that stretch of coastline, and from the bruised and battered heart of Glasgow, swarmed upon South Beach after answering the rallying call of a Facebook event invite.

They’d arrived by the train-load and fought, fucked and frolicked in the surf and sand-dunes, fueled by a cocktail of booze, bravado, pheromones and amphetamines. Officers on horseback had thundered down the beach trying to herd and repel the stampeding teens. Hundreds of sets of handcuffs had glinted in the sunlight, the closest thing to a sparkling diamond bracelet many of these young people would ever wear. It was absolute chaos.

These days, as a responsible, slightly dull father of two young children, it’s easy for me to tut-tut-tut at these weed-and-speed-whacked William Wallaces who re-enacted Buckfast Braveheart on the beach. But if I’d been a west-coast young ‘un with nothing better to do on a sunny bank holiday, and stumbled across that Facebook event notification, I’d’ve been supping Buckfast in my shorts down the train station before you could say, “Let’s do this! Who’s got the Vengaboys CD?!! No-one? What? They’re shit? Are they? … Oh, ha ha, yeah, fooled you, I was only joking… ha, YOU FELL FOR IT. I WAS ONLY JOKING! WHERE ARE YOU GOING?? COME BACK! I HATE THE VENGABOYS, YOU KNOW THAT!!… I WAS ONLY JOKING… I was… joking……”

That’s why the police were there. In case of a repeat. Which there sort of was. Maybe an echo is a better description. If it was a sequel, it would be Jurassic Park 3. The same pot, essentially, but just a little bit lamer, tamer and smaller. On the day we left, somebody was stabbed in the leg. The next day – the true anniversary – a mere few thousand drunken teens descended upon South Beach. A drop in the ocean.

Troon isn’t alone. Going to Largs or Ayr or anywhere along that coast-line on a sunny weekend or public holiday is like walking on to the set of an all-zombie reboot of the D-Day landings. It’s like God himself scooped up every ned in Glasgow and dumped them down on the sand.

Scotland doesn’t get much sunshine, so when it strikes it has a profound effect upon our brains and bio-chemistries. Other parts of the world get summers: definite, verifiable summers. We, on the other hand, might only get one sunny day throughout the whole season, or a disjointed string of sunny days spaced weeks or even months apart, so when we see the sun we scramble to condense three months of glee, glugging, gallus patter, fish batter, sun-stroke, chip-pokes, tugs, chugs and drugs into one single, savage day. It’s like that Paul Simon song re-rewritten for Hell: 50 Ways to Leave Your Liver.

But try adding 6000 ways to that.

You don’t get this kind of behaviour on the beaches of the east coast. I wonder why…

Hmmm, I think I know why…

But that’s a can of worms for another time.