(photo Helen’s Bay a few summers ago, went to pick my son up from a beach party – was amused at just how many beach parties there seemed to be)
Went for a walk this morning to Helen’s Bay. It’s a little beach a few miles outside of Belfast, and a short drive from my house.
Helen’s bay is the beach where students would traditionally go off on a summer’s night and do those jaws-like beach parties. But because it’s Northern Ireland it’s always sodding freezing.
But you can see on the ground the burnt tarmac of make shift fires.
This morning it was hundreds of little dogs out with their owners, and then the odd big dog.
I went to one beach party in Helen’s Bay. I hesitate to say I was more mature than most, but when everyone was going wild at uni I was working a day job so the wild side never really had a time to develop. I went with my mate Karl, and at one point a bunch of his mates thought it would be hilarious to throw me in the water. What they hadn’t accounted for is short people have low centres of gravity and so I hunkered down and was pretty much unshiftable. Or at least hard enough to shift they eventually gave up.
On the drive back, I was pretty annoyed and one of them complained about something and I cut him so deeply with a comment (too rude to repeat here) that, I later found out, that particular naval cadet was scared of encountering me again. I thought I was, like earth, mostly harmless.
Weird the stuff that sticks.
Yesterday In Social Media
Ah no time to add much, except to say go and listen to me’ learned collegue Paul Cornell’s adaptation of Iain M Banks excellent short “The State of the Art”. I love Banks while you can (30 days on the bbc iplayer)
