We’ve been on what has become an annual tradition today. It’s the school holidays so David’s sister Linda and her family have been in Devon on holiday. We go along each year to spend a day with them because we rarely see them in other circumstances. They always choose a destiny in the South Hams, a popular and I suppose quite posh part of south Devon.
This year, they are staying in Bigbury on Sea. It’s a small village on the coast as you might expect, but its claim to fame is the island off its coast. It’s Burgh Island – probably recently it is most famous for being the setting of Evil Under The Sun, one of Agatha Christie’s most well-known Poirot books and the David Suchet TV show was filmed on location on the island. In fact though, it has an illustrious history with the rich and famous.
I must be honest, I didn’t know where we were going until after we set off and I was asked to navigate. When we arrived it was clear that it was just about the most horrible place in all of Devon. A tiny triangle of sand (the beach) was being populated by what felt like a million people with barely a hair’s breadth between them. It was high tide and although at low tide there was quite a large area of sand, the high tide mark meant that it was overcrowded and horrible.
Linda’s idea was that we could take the sea tractor across to the island for lunch in the pub but it was obviously never going to work with the dogs – 30 people standing in the space of little more than a telephone box and JD would have been deeply distressed and that would have been bad for him, us and all of the other passengers.
The shore line faces south and is completely exposed to the mid-day sun with no shelter of any description. The choices were few: either tough it out by taking the dogs down to the beach where they would not have been able to be off their leads and we would have got completely fried; find somewhere on shore to eat along with a huge number of other people; or turn around and go home. Had it not been for the primary reason for our visit to be to spend time with Linda and her family I’d probably not have even got out of the car before going home.
After a fairly grim lunch in a café in the car park (not because the food was bad but because I’m not sure lunch in a car park could ever be good), we ended up spending a good chunk of the afternoon in the shade of a tree in the garden of the holiday apartment where Linda and her family were staying.
Late in the day, the tide had gone out enough to wade across to Burgh Island where we were greeted with lots of firmly shut gates like this one and signs saying a slightly more polite version of “hoi polloi keep out”. The amazing art deco hotel's owners own most of the island and it’s clear they tolerate tourists rather than welcoming them. To be frank, I don’t blame them. I don’t understand why it is when people know and understand that it wouldn’t be acceptable to go into a pub in Slough or Hemel Hempstead or wherever in bare feet or, worse still, in a bikini, they don’t see that it’s not acceptable in a seaside pub, cafe or hotel either. People just seem to switch off their sense of self-worth or their “unacceptable” filter and do things they’d never do at home. I expect I’ll get flamed at this but I don’t want to eat my lunch when there are almost naked people at the next table, no matter whether they’re twenty years old and “fit” or whether they’re 70 and wrinkly. The point at which it loses its acceptability is around about age six or seven, beyond that there is no excuse.
