Huddersfield to the coast and back
August 12th 1995
Full Moon
On the Saturday, we went for a drive in Tonya's car to the east coast. It wasn't very far to the closest part of the coast, just north of Hull, which is close to the mouth of the river Humber. We picked a town called Hornsea, which looked a likely sort of place on the map, and headed in that direction.
Hornsea was a very typical english small-time seaside town. It wasn't one of those frantic holiday resorts like Southend, Clacton, Brighton or Bridlington. It was a fairly quiet little place, with "bed and breakfast" signs all down to the seafront.
The beach was the usual british strip of muddy gravel, with great timber breakwaters running out from the shore every couple of hundred yards, in a vain attempt to stop the vicious North Sea taking away what's left of the gravel - and the rest of the island with it! There were quite a few people on the beach, although it was surprisingly uncrowded for the middle of summer. I suppose everyone goes to Spain now, not to the coast of Britain for their holidays. It's probably cheaper. There were the usual array of windbreaks - five foot high strips of canvas, stretched between poles stuck in the beach. I've never seen them anywhere else in the world, except on the cold and hostile beaches around the North Sea and other parts of Britain.
We sat on the massive concrete sea wall and had something to eat and then went down to walk along the beach. The water was surprisingly cold - much colder than the Blackwater, where i'd been swimming recently. I contemplated the idea of going for a swim, but i didn't manage to convince myself it was a good idea. The pub up on hill above the beach looked much more inviting and eventually we ended up there.
After we'd had enough of Hornsea, we drove down the coast a bit, to Mappleton, a fairly uninspiring place, not far south down the beach from Hornsea. Here, there was a car park at the top of a great earth cliff overlooking the beach. The cliff near the carpark had been heavily bulldozed in an attempt to stop it crumbling into the ever-advancing sea. It was a good seventy or eighty feet down to the beach and if you looked down the coast a short way, you could see it was in a constant process of being eaten away by the erosion which is nibbling constantly at England's east coast.
We didn't stop long at Mappleton, not even bothering to go down the long steep path to the beach, and we got back in the car and drove a bit further south, in the direction of the mouth of the Humber.
At Aldborough, a few miles further on, we stopped again and got out of the car to have a walk. The erosion here was much more spectacular than any of the other places and you could see the land was literally crumbling onto the beach. There were signs of roads that had disappeared, along with the hundred feet of soil that had lain beneath them, and houses gone too - probably pulled down for salvage before they fell into the hungry waters. A whole strip along the edge of the land was subsiding gradually and obviously suddenly falling occasionally, probably after heavy rain.
I thought it was a heart-warming sight in a way. I couldn't help feeling that as the sea advanced, gradually, but relentlessly, inch by inch, day by day, there was a definite point, somewhere unfortunately a long way in the future, when this dismal grey little island would have been completely consumed by the waves. Britain would cease to exist. The world wouldn't be much worse off without it, that's for sure! Maybe, rather than completely disappearing, it would become two islands, as the North Sea and the Irish Sea became one radioactive chemical soup, glowing green and phosphorescent in the night, between the north and south islands of Britain. Maybe the growing divide between north and south, that had become more obvious than ever during the years of Thatcher's ransacking and pillage, was just a social preview of the physical reality to come. Maybe by the time it happened, nobody would notice - except, of course, those unlucky citizens of the midlands, whose picturesque slagheaps would be gone forever.
- - -
I'd never been to a car boot sale before. Margaret and Tonya were moving soon and they had a lot of junk they wanted to take to a car boot sale and sell. Some of it was theirs, but most of it had come from Tonya's mother who'd also moved recently. So early on Sunday morning we loaded up the car with a folding table and a dozen or so boxes containing an amazing variety of household bits and pieces. The boot sale was in Halifax, which was about twenty minutes drive away, and when we got there it was already quite crowded.
The sale was held in a carpark near the centre of town. Anyone with a car and a pile of junk could pay a few quid and set up a stall there. Before we'd even stopped the car, we were surrounded by frantic would-be buyers, hoping for the lucky find, the bit of junk that wasn't - wasn't junk, that is. I don't know if they were dealers, collectors or just plain crazy, but they were all over the stuff in the boot before we could even get it out.
It was amazing. I hadn't seen anything like it since the one time i worked behind a stall at a jumble sale. As soon as the doors had opened, this massive wave of desperate people rushed down the entire length of the hall, like a deranged swarm of locusts, out to devour every bargain they could get their hands on. I don't know what it is about second-hand stuff that gets british people so excited, but if you value your life, you don't try and jump the queue at a jumble sale!
And this boot sale was like a gigantic jumble sale. Any sort of second hand things you could possibly imagine were on sale there that morning. Cups, plates, knives, records, radios, coats, shirts, fishing rods, televisions, washing machines, wardrobes, clocks, electrical gadgets, computers, badges, books, lamps, chairs, spanners, hammers, chisels, rope, wire, ornaments, pictures, cameras, toys, typewriters, everything.
We spent most of the morning there and sold almost everything we'd brought. It was an interesting experience. So typically english. I'd forgotten about these sort of events in my years on the other side of the world. I'd never seen anything like the british passion for other people's junk anywhere else i'd ever been. The only thing that came near it, i reckoned, was the second hand car trade.