Bonus Post: 2019 Beach Diaries #2

  There's a man swimming in the sea. The sun's quite warm when it breaks the clouds, but the water looks cold. When he wades back onto shore, he pulls open the front of his trunks and peers down, as though checking it's all still there.

 Since the last post, I hit a Bad Birthday. While walking the dog I'm sitting, I'm trying to avoid grim reflection; trying to find no meaning in the last 9 months of old classmates' posts clogging my Facebook feed, showing their surprise parties, surprise holidays, celebratory meals around packed tables of smiling family and friends, while I spent mine sat home writing an essay about the Karate Kid cartoon. I'm trying not to think about that big, round number; about no longer fitting any definition of the word 'young' (unless finding myself in the company of a recently discovered bog-body), and definitely not about my own standing in life.

  
  As the dog sniffs at a bush, someone walks past, talking about their plans for this evening, having been invited to a friend's for dinner. It suddenly occurs that I've never done that; been invited to a friend's house for a meal. Probably not weird. Probably not a perfectly-distilled statement about my toxic personality and inability (and lack of desire) to form anything beyond chummy acquaintanceships. Probably normal. Probably fine. 

  A woman sits on a bench outside one of our many vape shops in the drizzle, eating a foot-long swiss roll as if it's a banana.   

  In the park, behind the duck pond, there's a photoshoot with a male/female singing duo posing with a gold 1950's style mic, hands jazzily splayed and mouths wide open. She's dressed like a circus ringmaster, he, a snooker player. The photographer, as if recently escaped from a cartoon, has a little jazz hepcat beard and an actual beret.

  
 “Beautiful!” he cries, with each snap of the shutter, “I love your energy!” It's one of those moments of such overwhelming cliché, it re-enforces the growing sense that I'm trapped in a simulation; a really lazy simulation. In this badly-written Truman Show, I'm apt to turn a corner and see a dog with a string of sausages in its mouth being chased by an angry butcher; an out of control wheelchair careening towards two men carrying a pane of glass; a buck-toothed vicar gasping as a businessman's trousers fall down.

  
 This is an exact portrait of human society, according to the programmers of this rubbish Matrix; the peoples of a far-future Earth, or race of advanced aliens, whose only knowledge of the 21st century, found preserved in an underground bunker on our ravaged planet, was an old stack of Whizzer and Chips.   
 

 A dogwalker with a poo-bag around his hand tries to pick up the dirts his dog just laid on the pebbles alongside the prom, but it's one of those messy ones that smears everywhere like chocolate mousse. Looking behind him to see if anyone's watching, he grabs a handful of little rocks, fastidiously burying the evidence underneath, like when someone dies in the wilderness in a cowboy film. 

  A man in his late forties, long hair streaked with grey, in a sensible jumper and slacks, mounts a skateboard down by the river. He's watched by an assembled group of family; what I take to be his wife, a set of parents, and an elderly woman in a wheelchair. They cheer him on, clearly having brought the board down especially, for him to show off his skills to the older lady.

  
  He skates up to the pier and back, in a slightly wobbly, nervous way that suggests he's not been on one for a couple of decades. There are no flips or tricks, but on the return journey, he's grown in confidence, arms no longer out at the sides for balance. When he makes it back in one piece, he seems relieved. His supporters give a small round of applause as he hands the board back to his wife.

    
  “God,” he says, slightly out of breath, “my knees.” 

 Graffiti on the boarded-up Waitrose reads “DENNIS THE CUNT”

 I know The Beano has to change with the times, but that's a bit much.