The View from the Pier

Commonplace Newsletter #93

The summer season is over and so the streets of this seaside town are quiet. There is the occasional dog walker and sprightly leather faced local out to buy a pint of milk or a pouch of tobacco or a takeaway coffee to have while watching the ocean waves, but that’s about it. It’s a peaceful kind of quiet here today, an enveloping quiet, and unlike the desolate lonely quiet that can accompany nightwalking in a city, this unhurried hush brings contentment and thoughts that are kind and generous and grateful.

Or perhaps this is just the effect the English seaside has on me on days like today. Or perhaps it is because I am in a position where I can wake up on a crisp and bright autumnal weekday such as this and decide- fairly spontaneously- that I will take a local coastal train with my wife and have a full English breakfast at a cafe and then go to the pier and look out on the water and play on the machines in the arcade. And if I have my little detective’s notebook and pen on hand, and if I observe impressions and collect notes and images then I can turn this fun experience into meaningful work and effectively get paid for living my life in this way. This is a privilege, and it’s something I must explicitly articulate now, not out of boastfulness, but just so I don’t forget this position I find myself in.

These thoughts- which fully dawned on me when I alighted the train and walked far enough from the station to smell the ocean and hear the gulls- lifted my spirits. I found myself smiling and nodding at the few people out here- a sparrow like Lycra clad jogger who was too engrossed in her headphones and endorphins to pay me any mind and a couple of pensioners who were playfully bickering as they passed by on his and hers mobility scooters. I imagined they had been happily needling each other for decades and wouldn’t have it any other way. Smiling still, I strolled the promenade and the esplanade- words full of romance and memory and aspiration- and managed to forgo the temptation to clasp my hands behind my back as I did so. In some ways I am semi-retired already but I am a good few decades away from having earned the nobility of the old man, hands-behind-back walking posture. But hopefully I’ll get there one day.

This brief daydream of septuagenarian dignity was cut short by the Victorian Grand Pier itself coming into view. The building you walk through to get to the walkway itself- the one that houses all the tuppenny machines and plush toy grabbing machines and one armed bandits- looked like it had been given a lick of paint since I was here last a couple of years ago, the new bright mid-blue of the exterior now a similar shade to the streaky blue sky above and its off-white accents resembling the ocean foam and the sunlight as reflected in the water. It looked good, revitalised, but beyond this the columns on which the walkway rested as it stretched out into the water were rusty and tired and weather beaten even though they still rose out of the water straight and true and strong.

This pier is over 150 years old (according to the tourist information placard out front) and it has been beaten by wind and rain and waves year after year. Around a decade ago the end deck of the walkway- a wider section used as a ballroom in the fifties and sixties, and then as a go kart track in more recent years- was destabilised during winter storms that also washed a section of the local train track out to sea.

Many saw this as the sad but inevitable end of this particularly neglected and under-appreciated seaside institution yet somehow it has endured and survived- with the exception of the end section- and is being slowly rebuilt. This is why I am here today to take it all in and to contribute to the cause via getting fleeced on £1 a go machines that convert skill into minuscule volumes of tokens which can then be redeemed for valueless plastic tat.

But before I did this I wanted to go through the arcade and to the walkway itself that lay beyond it and to have a look at the years old damage and the restoration efforts. It did not look promising. Most of what remained of the walkway was cordoned off behind a metal fence and this sectioned off area had now become a seagull shit splattered path of mossy wood- a Jackson Pollock like piece if the colour palette were to only consist of brown, white and a yellowish green. It was made sadder still by the two rows of ornate street lamps that ran along both edges with their charming Victorian designs and seahorse motifs on either side of the lampposts. The seahorse icon was repeated everywhere. On the modern walkway fence and in pillar box red against that new blue paint job out front I mentioned earlier. It was iconic and memorable and spoke of an understanding of design that seems to have diminished in the decades and decades since this town’s Victorian seaside heyday. This could be a whole essay topic in itself- and I don’t want to bring down the mood of this piece by harping on it- but look around at billboards and corporation font decisions and tell me that the art of effective visual communication in the public sphere hasn’t diminished massively since the turn of the century.

But anyway. I pushed these observations to one side and rested on a bench with decorative ironwork arms and looked down between the wooden slats of the pier to the ocean water below. I looked across to see a mother snapping smartphone photos of her posed and disinterested children. I imagined her phone slipping from her hand and through this gap (which it would fit into perfectly). I wondered if her mortified annoyance would give way to a form of relief. Of feeling free. Unlikely.

Once the photoshoot ended the kids, now allowed to roam the pier, knelt to look between the planks, fascinated and terrified both. I remember doing the same when I was their age as well as leaning over railings and peering over walls to sheer drops below. The heady adrenaline thrill of playing with the imp of the perverse and feeling the onset of an awareness of mortality as you look down to drops that would signal your doom. Perhaps it was this impulse that made the Victorians build these high walkways out across the sea in the first place. That and the fact that they could, which seems to be a major driver of a lot of their innovation and industry.

I jotted some of this down in my little notebook, the form and content both borderline incomprehensible to anyone but me. Seahorses, seagull shit and moss green, imp of the perverse, design regression. I knew I had the building blocks of something. Of this.

And so with that done I got to the real reason for being here- the machines, specifically the basketball game that I can recall playing as a child and the strange pride and disappointment that came when I became old enough and skilled enough to first compete with and then beat my dad at it. Such things are what pass for manhood initiations in times such as these…

I put my coin in the machine and made my first throw. And then again and then again. The tickytacky feel of the basketball’s surface was familiar as was the countdown clock and the swish of making a basket. I’m no athlete and I was no high school sportsman (I was more of the smoke cigarettes behind the bike shed, play in bands, skip classes to go to the pub or go to matinees and record shopping type) but I’m good at games like this. Clear your mind, focus, shut out the outside world and then hit a target over and over. That’s my kind of thing. The reprieve of forgetting about yourself and your situation by temporarily devoting yourself to a game, to a simplistic repetitive task. No meaning, no pondering and meta analysis (why should I do this? Is it right to do this? And so on). Just do.

The countdown hit zero. The game ended. The machine spewed out a long line of tokens. My score topped the leader board- a not especially impressive feat so early in the day. I played a second game- less impressive this time as the empty minded zen state of free throwing diminished- and then we cashed in our haul of tokens for a plastic keyring and a golden pencil¹. These were worth maybe a fifth of the value of the cash that we had put into the basketball game and a few other machines. But that’s not the point, of course. The point is that the pier and the arcade are holding on- just about- and that in coming here and jotting down these impressions I can say that I did a little something to make sure this faded seaside institution doesn’t fade away just yet. But more than this I had a fun day out, and that is meaning enough for me.

Until next time,

Live well.

Tom.

1. Not real gold.