Spring is the best season in Bournemouth, just ahead of autumn. Winter and summer are both dreadful. The former because it’s so cold, bleak and bloody miserable. The latter because the town swells with tourists, from a population of about eighty thousand up to several billion. Or so it seems.
A decent spring, April through to June, with co-operative weather, can be jolly nice. The beaches are empty, the town centre is pleasant to walk through and the traffic is just at normal levels of grid lock, not the super grid lock we get in summer.
This spring is already looking a bit busier than normal though. Every cafe and restaurant has set up shop outside, on the pavement. It’s all a little bit European. Which is a bit ironic really, given the politics of the last few years. Still, I like Euro pavement culture. We could rename the town Bôurnemouth d’Azur. And now that everyone has gotten over the initial excitement of the shops all reopening, it’s all beginning to look and feel more like it should.
I’m going to make the most of this spring. I’m going to enjoy it. Because this summer is going to be a staycation summer in the UK, and Bournemouth is going to be hell on earth*. Or Bôurnemouth d’Hades, if we’re sticking with Eurospeak.
* but it will also be the much needed shot in the arm for local businesses.
Just be glad that you do not live in my traditional beach town of Blackpool. It suffers the same defects as Bournemouth in Summer and Winter. But when the Summer crowds recede, all that is left is just Blackpool. And a couple of snazzy restaurants.
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Also, it is ‘Up north’. And as anyone and everyone knows, anything that is so much as a half furlong north of the Watford Gap is….well…just quite ghastly. Probably.
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Well, I had to look that one up, I can say that on my two trips to England I was never north of Watford Gap. In fact I was never north of the Cotswolds.
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To be honest, most people in the UK could do with looking it up. They confuse the Northamptonshire Watford Gap with Watford in Herts. I did, for a long time.
To be equally honest, everything north of Watford Herts is ‘up north’ as far as I’m concerned.
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I had to look that one up too. It’s very close to where my cousin lives in Borehamwood.
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In my line of work, engineering, I worked with a lot of Brits. I loved the sense of humour. I can remember North of the Watford Gap as a description used in jest.
Brings back some memories.
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Frankly, Hadrian would have been better advised to build his wall through the Watford Gap. He went far too far north.
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