In the midst of a New Year's computer tidy-up, I keep coming across pre-edited copies of old newspaper articles of mine. There's so many of them, and I'm proud enough of them, that I'm going to start posting a few pieces - play-ethic related, if only tangentially - on this site.
First up is an essay I did for the Scottish edition of the Sunday Times in August 2003, about my experience and memories of family holidays in Scottish seaside towns (in extended post below). My theoretical dislike of the work-leisure/work-life dichotomy (I prefer the notion of a play-care continuum) doesn't blind me to the richness of holidays. This piece is closer to Tom Hodgkinson's idea of the vacation as a space of idleness, a chance to re-evaluate the structures of our productive, useful life. And also, to do that most restorative of play activities: be present with one's children, fully and unreservedly.
Largs Elegy [Essay on Scottish Seaside Towns]
Pat Kane
Sunday Times Scotland, August 2003
The speedboat was long and elegant, made of beautifully polished wood, carried at least nine comfortably – and we just couldn’t resist it. The girls and I clambered in, and the helmsman gunned it furiously across the sparkling bay: the pointed prow lifting clear of the water, and an impressive wash behind it. We turned our smiling faces to the sea-spray, a welcome respite from the merciless afternoon sun.
“Not bad for Largs, eh?” I shouted to the elder teenage daughter. She was too deep in her Audrey Hepburn moment to even read my lips. Meanwhile, my six-year old squealed with delight. “This is so much better than the donkeys, Dad!”
I’d love to say that this Mediterranean fantasy moment is typical of my lifetime’s experience of the Scottish seaside town. But sitting on that surging boat last Monday, as the sun kissed the deep green hills and granite housefronts of Largs, it seemed more like a rare reward for decades of teeth-gritted determination. Why do I keep going back to these places – Rothesay, Helensburgh, Millport, Arran, Ayr, Oban, Portobello, even Girvan for god’s sake – when you can get to Naples, or Lisbon, for the price of ten family rides on a Largs speedboat?
There are immediately practical answers, and there are deeply felt answers to this question. Most immediately, it addresses two problems: my inability to drive (and that’s a whole other article), and my school-holidaying kids’ need for regular diversion. Monday in Largs was the first expedition of its kind this summer, and it won’t be the last.
For me, at least, the train trip to the Scottish seaside ticks off most of the boxes on the parental checklist. You travel for two to three hours there and back in a secure and climate-controlled space, with tables for drawing, crisps for eating and toilets for emergencies. Then a calm stroll to a sea-front that’s usually howling with the necessary distractions – ice-cream, crazy golf, bouncy castles, adventure equipment, dayglo rides, fish’n’chips, not to mention sand and sea (if the conditions aren’t too Baltic). And usually, some functioning (though malodorous) public toilets.
So thankful am I for all these structural legacies of the heyday of 20th century Scottish tourism, that sunshine becomes a mad, Bacchanalian bonus. For day-tripping parents, it’s enough that the distance between grazed knee, and Germoline, is only a dash over the road to a high-street chemist’s. A little summer downpour is hardly a burden to bear.
But it would be a bit much to claim that this pilgrimage to the Scottish resort is an entirely child-oriented affair. “Are there any rides at this place?” is the irritated lament of my youngest, whenever some overly-glottal placename is mentioned as a possible daytrip. You see, we’ve done the Disney thing, both Florida and Paris. And once your average info-kid has tasted the simulated fruits of the Magic Kingdom, its perfumed air and plastic trees and sensory overload…well, anything else can seem like a drag backwards through dead heather.
So the Scottish parent often has to pull the silken cord of memory to get them willingly on the train: “this is where your Mum/Dad used to go when we were little”. In my experience, this has a 50/50 chance of acceptance: kids are fascinated to think that their parents also once plowtered about knickerlessly in rockpools, or devoured ornate sundaes in faded cafés. But of course, we parents are on our own memory trips too.
As the girls now know all too well, their mother and I share those holiday experiences of the sixties and seventies Scottish working class. Turning up at a big-city train station didn’t signify just another commute to the suburbs, but the beginning of a long-awaited sojourn to a beloved world. A world made of spades-and-buckets, unsteerable pedallos, mercilessly imprisoned crabs and vast empires of dark, wet sand.
The most intense memories for me are, bizarrely, of the relatively nondescript Ayrshire resort of Girvan. Its expanses of top-quality beach were one thing - but its own tiny slivers of theme-part excess were something else. I can still physically vibrate at the thought of its unspeakably exciting motorboat park (sheer autonomy at three mph!), and its surreal, early-seventies psychedelic fright ride (which I am sure turned me into the mad futurist I am today). At the end of every day, as we wandered back to our caravan park fish suppers in hand, I remember thinking that Girvan was a pounding megalopolis of sheer fun. We went back several times, enjoying the same routines, until a one-off Italian holiday spoiled us forever.
And when we went back with the kids, one overcast day in the late nineties? Girvan didn’t just fall short of the memory; it positively bristled with menace. In the long promenade shelters where we used to shelter from the frequent rain, some lost boys in sports gear were drinking and louting with a steady determination. There were as many shop fronts boarded up as there were open: I couldn’t get out of there quick enough, with a perplexed family in tow.
Yet this feels like an exception. Most of my favourite Scottish seaside towns still retain a kind of energy and quirkiness about them – something not-quite-suburban in their social mix. My experience has recently been given some research back-up. A report last month from Sheffield Hallam University, surveying the 43 largest resort towns in England, Scotland and Wales, notes that the population of these towns has actually risen by 360,000 over the last 30 years – in contract to the outflux of families from industrial towns.
The factors seem to be both permanent and transitory. People are positively electing to buy property in coastal areas: but the availability of private rented accommodation in former boarding houses also attracts less stolid residents. (The demographic bulge of the “third age”, and the need for residential homes, is also surely a factor).
Seaside towns like Brighton have always benefited from this kind of mix, developing its own rich cultural scene amid the faded splendour and battering waves. In Scotland, there are fitful sparks of seaside bohemia emerging (the Highland and North Sea Islands already have their Gaelic and Nordic influences to fuel their scenes). The Dunoon and Islay Jazz festivals steadily pick up steam. Arran has a decent brace of brand-conscious craft and food producers, and resident artists doing serious work.
But as Alasdair Gray once said about Glasgow, a place needs to be imagined before it can really be lived in: and it seems that Rothesay, that sugar-coned little island in the Kyles of Bute, contains enough dreams (and nightmares) to justify artistic attention. In recent times, achingly hip Glasgow bands like Mogwai have played its pavilion, bringing boatloads of indie kids to sprawl around the wrought-iron seafront benches.
For these cultural hipsters, Rothesay will always be shrouded in the allure of celebrity crash’n’burn: for Rothesay is where Scotland’s very own singing wonder, Lena Zavaroni, was born and brought up. Andrew O’Hagan’s portrayal of the town in his recent novel Personality (obliquely inspired by the life and times of the Zavaroni family) makes it a rain-blurred backdrop for his usual psychodramas – a crucible of raging souls chasing their demons through tea-shops and chintzy front rooms. Yet another dissection of “Thin Ayrshire” (one of the chapter titles of O’Hagan’s 1998 classic, The Missing).
There was nothing of that sort when we visited the Zavaroni’s family chippie a few years ago, still sizzling away strongly. But there is something about the slow-motion pace of these places which makes you imagine all manner of emotional traumas pulsing away behind the lace curtains. In Alasdair Gray’s 1982 Janine, the alcoholic and psychotic lead character Jock McLeish drinks himself to oblivion in a generic Scottish seaside hotel room, its watery blandness allowing all manner of sadistic fantasies to rage through his mind. And the Oban that emerges from Alan Warner’s novels – particularly Lynne Ramsay’s luminescent film version of Morvern Callar – is a tartan-wreathed hell-hole of anomie and disconnectedness.
But it’s the job of the literati to take appearances for deception and delusion. I’d like to see them make an avant-garde drama out of the happy, noisy Largs I experienced this week. As we plunged into our Rum Babas and Five-Flavour Melbas, in the wobbly and fraying splendour of Nardini’s Ice Cream Parlour, the girls and I reflected on a well-formed day. My only regret was that we neglected to buy the fish suppers that, in time-honoured tradition, would be gravely consumed while sitting on the platform at Largs station, waiting for its lapidary train to decide to arrive.
Whether it’s the misty nostalgia of Central Belt dads, ruminating on the shape of their lives so far, or the raw desires of screenage children, happily expending their copious supplies of surplus energy, the Scottish seaside town can still satisfy its visitors. All this, and sun-drenched powerboating as well! As we huddle together under hammering rain, on some future day-trip to some slate-grey resort, that’ll be something to remember.
