A watched beach never palls!

Part of the devilish compact that you agree to when you start writing blogs is, at the very least, to be regular contributor.

There is nothing worse than the expectation of inconsequential froth being denied by the wayward attitude of a supposedly confirmed blogger. I can only appeal to the anti-literary effects of family to excuse my tardy response to my reader anxiously waiting to hear the most recent moan from a newish arrival in Spain!

As a compensation for the day’s rest from literary labour I promise that I won’t moan once during this screed. Whoops! Wrong word to use if I am to keep my word!

Living so close to the beach (ahem!) it is only to be expected that I have begun to analyse the Spanish attitude to the littoral.

It is a disturbing fact that on the beach today in Castelldefels I only saw two black people – and both were trying to sell bootleg CDs and DVDs. Although all the people around me were ostentatiously trying to achieve a darker hue that the one which they had been given at birth; there were no people for whom that darker hue was by nature theirs. I have no idea how much of the population of Spain is black, but I’m sure that Castelldefels is not representative. I will keep my eyes open and report back when I have a few statistics to bandy about.

When I visited Castelldefels for the first time, I picked up some tourist information and emblazoned across one map showing the beach and very little else, it said, “Castelldefels: More than a Beach!” I thought it sounded a little desperate, but a cursory jaunt around the town would give the lie to the assumption that this was a community anxiously hoping to find another reason to exist other than the swathe of sand stretching into the distance. Castelldefels is a thriving 365 day town which, according to Toni, boasts a population of 150,000. I don’t quite know where they keep this number of people; there are only so many that you can pack into flats!

But, let’s face it; if you have seashore along the Mediterranean within easy reach of a major city like Barcelona, you’re not exactly going to pretend that it’s not there! In other words, my adopted town is used to a tourist or two dropping by to take the waters and a bit of sun.

The differences between Spain and Britain are instructive. Spanish people expect sunshine when they come to the coast; it’s their birthright. British people hope for sunshine and, if they get it, they treat it like a treasured gift to talk about later,

Virtually everyone in Spain, especially if they visit the coast in a family group, will have a parasol, which they will use. In Britain taking a parasol to the beach is usually looked on as an affectation with the person obviously boasting that their last holiday was to a place where such a thing might have been needed.

The Spanish also have a different approach to sitting on the beach. In my youth in the late 50s and early 60s there was a craze for sun loungers. These were metallic contraption which folded up to a size just too big to carry easily and unfolded into a coffin shaped piece of furniture of stretched canvas on a skeleton of hollow metal tubes. They were excruciatingly uncomfortable and the canvas not only rotted after the first year but also stretched and sagged in a most unbecoming way. And, yes madam, your bum does look big in that as it swung low on the metal tubes with flesh almost touching the sand.

The Spanish have made a virtue of necessity and their furniture of choice is a sort of truncated folding garden furniture chair with a long back curved at the top with a sort of lip. Since this is virtually on the sand, any sagging looks intentional rather than embarrassing. This counter intuitive seating contraption also has a ratchet mechanism which allows the back to recline which gives the illusion of a real Spanish ‘hamaca’ but keeps your feet, literally and firmly on the ground. If you make the mistake of relaxing in a recumbent position then you will probably find yourself unable to rise with any degree of dignity and will have to wait until the people around you have gone back to the city before you assay a resurrection!

I am also fascinated by where people choose to plonk themselves when they go to the seaside.

Most of us are like timid lemmings who lose their natural urges at the last moment and flock only to the water’s edge and stake a claim to 'our bit of beach', so that by the middle of the afternoon the waves are lapping on a crust of humanity lying around like flotsam strewn along the beach by a particularly savage storm. But that does not account for everyone.

There are always a series of lone wolves and whatever she-wolves are called. Some of these adopt the approach of the yellow Labrador bitch who, in any family, never wants to be obtrusive so she finds an innocuous out-of-the-way place in which to sleep: like a doorway – so everyone has to step over her! In the same way these lone wolves place themselves cunningly on a major sandy thoroughfare and try and look unconcerned or vaguely annoyed as everyone traipses past them.

Then there are those who place themselves to see (mirrored shades are de rigueur so eyes can flicker unseen but see everything) or who place themselves to be seen (mirrored shades are de rigueur so that people can see themselves reflected and realise how inadequate they are compared with the shades wearer.)

And I think that I am not keeping my promise that I made at the beginning.

So I’ll stop.