IT has been suggested to me by a friend that if I say once more: 'It's good for the garden' during a torrential downpour, I may end up with a black eye awarded by those who don't necessarily welcome getting saturated on the way to the shops and don't care if their beans are drying out. OK, I get the point. I'll stop saying it. But it is!
Despite showers, it's certainly beach weather and I love beaches. Or rather I love watching people on beaches. It's not that I'm nosy, or perhaps it is, but I call it research into holiday habits and behaviour. There are such distinct types of people who go to the beach, and if you are lucky you'll get a whole range of them in one day. On a recent Saturday, for instance, there were two parties of youngish people, blokes in shorts with very white chests and legs and girlfriends or wives in very small bikinis. The ones to our left were English and very noisy, to our right were from some Eastern European country, and much quieter. I took a silent bet with myself that I knew what would happen next, and it did. The men in both parties stood up, eyed the sea, then rushed down the sand, ran in, and threw themselves into a kind of belly-flop/shallow dive under the water. The sea was icy cold, which I knew because I'd dipped a toe in earlier. Both groups then surfaced and tried to disguise the agony of being suddenly immersed in freezing water, just like you do when you fall over in the street and leap up pretending you haven't injured yourself even though your knees and elbows are bleeding copiously. Blokes always do this, it's a kind of mating ritual for the twentysomethings. Girls usually creep in an inch at a time, flicking bits of water over themselves and shrieking in a lady- like way, while their partners encourage them with: 'It's warm when you get in', which isn't usually true. Then there are the elderly couples who carefully pick their way down the beach to the sea carrying chairs, a windbreak, rugs, a stout bag containing sandwiches and thermos flask, a woolly rug and, absolutely essential even in a heatwave, cardigans. They usually plonk themselves at the water's edge, meaning they either have to move backwards or forwards at frequent intervals depending on the way the tide is running. They don't go in the sea but on a hot day the male half may remove his socks and sandals, but nothing else. They have a lovely time. A little further down the beach you will find the party who have brought everything but the kitchen sink, or actually they probably have brought the kitchen sink. They have Argos's finest range of outdoor eating equipment and they've taken over about an acre of sand with tables, chairs, several windbreaks, beach umbrellas, camping stoves, barbecue with all possible barbecue accessories, plastic table cloths with matching plastic cups, plates, bowls, mugs and cutlery, half a dozen cool boxes, lots of bags, spades, buckets, lilos, blow-up boats, blow-up funny animals and, perhaps, even a fun blow-up banana, plus a pump to blow them up. There will be rugs, plastic sheets, straw mats and towels. They've enough equipment to stay a fortnight and it takes a long time to set up and longer to dismantle. The sun worshippers are out there, too – not quite so many as there used to be since skin cancer scares hit home, but still quite a few – laid out flat like slices of bacon, turning when one side is done, slathering themselves or each other with suncream. They rarely venture near the water and carry only bottles of designer water and a beach mat. The daring ones may go topless but don't hold your hopes up, boys. Here, also, we will have the newly arrived holidaymakers. The whole family will be wearing new holiday gear - the husband in short sleeved shirt, possibly in an Hawaiian pattern, and knee-length, slightly baggy shorts, the wife in sundress and high heeled sandals which she soon finds out aren't suitable for sand, the kids in shorts, T-shirts and flip flops. The adults will be very white initially. By the end of the day the wife and kids will have used suncream so will be slightly pink, the huband not – he thinks it's sissy – so he'll be a brighter shade of lobster and have to sleep on his stomach for the next week. Then there's the lone dipper who comes to the beach to swim then worries about where to put their gear, because these days you can't trust anyone. They warily eye their neighbours to see if they seem to be the sort of people who can be trusted to watch shoes, shirt, trousers and Y-fronts, plus car keys and wallet without nicking anything. Or they wrap everything into an unobstrusive, but actually very obtrusive, bundle and then back into the sea and get a crick in their neck as they try to swim and watch their property at the same time. Some partially bury their property in sand and then can't find it again. Further down the beach you always get at least one exotic stripper. They don't know this, they are actually trying to get out of their clothes and into their swimsuit as modestly as possible, but the twists and gyrations and bumbing and grinding they are doing under their towels wouldn't be out of place in a lap dance club and excite one or two lone males along the beach. Should they have purchased that peculiar garment designed for the purpose of beach undressing and dressing, a kind of bottomless towelling sack with a tie neck, their wiggles will be even more suggestive, especially when nether garments drop to the floor from beneath this equivalent of the burka. The need for this rigmarole seems inexplicable when the person doing it reveals a tiny bikini which hardly covers a nipple. I'm of the strip-off quickly and get the cossie on without any fuss or anybody noticing but then I'm of an age when nobody would notice anyway. Although it does successfully embarrass the daughters. And, finally, food. When I was a child it was hard- boiled eggs, cheese and tomato sandwiches, biscuits and buns and very weak tea from a flask and ice cream on the way home. Most things seemed to have sand adhering to them. I used to try harder, we not only had a picnic hamper – always annoyingly designed for four people and we were five so someone didn't get matching plates – but picnic food could be cold pizza, stuffed French bread, hard-boiled eggs, of course, pasties which are tailor-made for picnics, and fruit. Today's food is far more sophisticated. Wraps and ciabatta, raised pies, stuffed pitta, terrines and patés, and, according to one recipe section I read on Sunday, Scotch eggs made with quails' eggs. I tried Spar, but sadly they were fresh out of quails' eggs. Rick Stein is often seen on television making a huge cauldron of fish soup over a blazing fire on one of his nearby beaches, which I suspect wouldn't go down well on a crowded holiday beach. So that's the beach, where everyone is happy. They may have nearly come to blows in the traffic jam on the way down, the kids may have whinged and whined and one of them was almost certainly sick and they're all hungry and thirsty. But once established on gritty sand, with a hard- boiled egg, a thermos of tea and a bucket and spade, they're content.