A Scarborough landmark with a cogent warning for all
She wore army boots and red hold-up stockings that stopped 3 inches shy of her camouflage skirt – and be sure those three inches were taut and tanned and smooth… hinting at coolly inviting flesh beneath. A halter neck top that was within a whisker of being a bikini showcased her supple spine as she rolled her hips to the pounding, rushed, sexually charged beat – her messy fringe swinging just short of her glittering pout.
As she danced teasingly and homoerotically with her friend – herself dressed as a nurse of the mid-70′s Barbara Windsor ilk, with fallen white stockings bunched alluringly around her stilettos – she unknowingly reduced a consignment of men from Leeds to immediate and crushing middle age.
There comes a moment in every man’s life when the fact of his own mortality is thrust upon him so. He must face the dismal realisation that never again will such a girl so much as look at him in a nightclub (if she ever did!) and that he has entered the age of ‘it wasn’t like this when I were a lad’. As Shakespeare put it:
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o’ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
Or as Tony – more of whom later – put it, somewhat more prosaically:
“Fuck me – I wish I wasn’t fat, old, pissed and didn’t stink like the sewers of ancient Baghdad”.
To which I could only nod, dumbly slavvering into my pint in silent agreement.
We were in Scarborough for a stag do, trapped in a bar-cum-bordello by our own inertia and a good, solid 14 hours straight drinking. Whatever the shortcomings of our hair and waistlines, our strategy of starting drinking on the train at 9 in the morning had put us at immediate disadvantage.
A further 5 hours on the terraces of Scarborough cricket ground, watching Yorkshire grind out a defeat against Warwickshire (is that even a county?), playfully punching and ribbing each other amongst a steady influx of pints-in-plastic and sausage rolls and we had settled into an easy camaraderie
Most of us have, in some way or other, known each other for decades – me and Galoot, for instance, were at preschool together. And while the likes of Baggers were only tangentially known to me mostly everyone conformed to type: encroaching paunch, glimmers of grey, nothing remaining in the way of ego or self-regard. “Good solid lads,” in the phraseology of the pub.
Tony was a relative newcomer – but his manner of introduction is instructive of the kind of party it was. His disarming opening gambit on meeting us in the station: “lads, my arsehole must look like a raw hamburger… I’ve not shit solid for 3 days. Don’t share my pint unless you want dysentery. Oh – and the name’s Tony.”
We quickly came to believe him as a noxious and overpowering aroma would periodically emanate from his direction, scattering crowds and – believe it! – putting paid to the faint notion of talking to any of the girls who had accidentally wandered within incoherent shouting distance.
Later, it would transpire that the ‘private dancer’ tattoo on the small of his back was no mere irony and that he had actually been a professional dancer in Ibiza for 2 years and played a bit-part in the video for Club Tropicana. Truly the stars play with Laughing Sam’s dice!
Away from the cheerful, winking glitz of its sea front, which curves fetchingly around the bay in glittering golds and reds beneath the honeyed ramparts of the castle, Scarborough is a kind of Mos Eisley-on-Sea. A series of bars, each one more dangerous than the last, in the deep fretwork of alleyways that run between the buildings piled higgledy-piggledly against its slopes.
Once proud fishing cottages and warehouses now play host to gaggles of alluring girls and alarming boys – the latter pale, waxy and tough. And amid them, the occasional knot of slightly-out-of-place blokes, bobbing uncertainly to the beat, clinging to their pints like masts in a storm.
In the morning I arose first and early – a habit I already had before nearly 5 years of parenting made it into a character trait. Unable to sleep in the dense fug of Travel Lodge heat and beery farts, I went for a morning walk.
Away from town, the esplanade wends its leafy way down to the front beyond the Winter Gardens – that fascinating place of agely refuge with its neat arrays of chairs and grand piano (under wraps from the elements at this time of a morning).
Past the cheerful painted beach huts to the end of the front, where the faded past still clings to the weathering cliffs… a 70s concrete addition crumbling, unloved amid the jaunty pink and white huts… the lido now modishly replaced with a night-time ‘star map’ that glows at your feet on an evening. The tinctured blue sky arced away to meet the far horizon, and as I looked across the mirror-flat North Sea – a gentle mistress today – I reflected that there truly are worse places to find oneself.
Like Bridlington.
Sounds like a good weekend