“I must go down to the sea again,
To the lonely sea and sky.
I left my pants and socks there,
I wonder if they’re dry?”
(Spike Milligan)

MY BEACH by Martin Deeson

On my desktop is a picture of a beach. Just like a billion other laptops around the world. I wonder just how many computers, as they put themselves to rest, flash up a picture of a sunset across golden sands framed by palm trees. A billion, I reckon, at least.

From doctors surgeries to city trading rooms to student halls to the very White House itself - you can guarantee there is always going to be someone with a shot of ‘my beach’ on their desktop.

It’s like some kind of torture. The stick and the carrot to keep you working. “Look at this beach,” says the carrot, “keep working and you’ll get more of this.” Or is it, the stick of indolence: “Why work?” Says the stick. “When you could be here?”

My beach is a secret. Which is not to mean that no one else knows about it. Quite the contrary. But if you know it you’ll recognise it from the pictures. If you don’t recognise it then, sorry, you’ll have to find your own. There’s only so many miles of sand at my beach and so much room in the surf, or on the best fishing rocks or in the one pub: so you’ll just have to find your own beach.

What makes this beach, ‘my beach’? We used to go there when we were kids, of course. Because anywhere with such throbbing emotional significance, such tangible feelings of nostalgia has to be somewhere you were in the heat wave of seventy six, or when puberty was just an adventure or before work and cars and wives and kids became the day to day, when summer was long and pubes were rare and cider was as good as it got.

For anyone with their own beach there will be bitterness mixed with the sweet, there will be sand, if you will, in the sandwiches.

For many their beach will be in Thailand, or Indonesia or somewhere else at the end of a very long haul flight. For them the bitterness will be inherent in that fact: their beach is just too far away. For me, the bitterness that tangs the sweet comes because my beach is always in another country – the almost paradise, the unsettling, the faded land of nostalgic memory.

But history is denied it’s fossils: I go back all the time, and overlay nostalgia with new memories. Last year… I decided to mainline on ‘my beach’ and went back to live there for six months. I rented a caravan, stocked up on board wax and cider and sat down to write a book. In November… on the Atlantic Coast… in a caravan… off season… alone.

And that way I did get to know ‘my beach’ very well. Instead of being a place where I had prayed for my parents to get divorced on family holidays, a place where I had dreamed about what it would even feel like to lose my virginity, ‘my beach’ became a place where I lived: I got to know intimately the patterns carved in the sand like a new sculpture twice a day, every day, as the long tide pulled out; I walked on that beach every day for six months and found stranded porpoises, giant jellyfish like grounded fleshy spaceships and heaps of every kind of human shit you can imagine washed in three thousand miles from the East Coast of America, or off a pasing trawler.

I started to go mad on that beach. To hear voices coming out of the sea, to imagine that the ocean and the mountains behind were something I could communicate with and to think that drinking cider for breakfast was a productive way for a novelist to carry on.

I think I learned a lot there but, like it is when you really learn something, I have no idea what it was.

I had a great time on ‘my beach’ and, after six months I ran back to London like a sailor on shore leave being smothered in the arms of his long lost lover.

In short, I was glad to be home.

And ‘my beach’? My beach is now back where it belongs – on my desktop. And in my memories.

I’ll go there soon.