around these parts, we all know when whitey first went to the beach, a lovely little beach known as camp cove – january 26 1788. we celebrate it every year with a national holiday known as australia/invasion day (or thank-god-our-forebearers-got-the-hell-out-of-cold-stinky-old-england day).
and conditions at the beach today are cracking – light offshore winds, 10-12 foot faces on the waves and water temp of 20c/70f. wouldn’t be dead for quids!
it’s not the recreation but the extras
It was invented when Merry Olde Englande single-handedly assaulted and gloriously vanquished the Nazi Hun on the D-Day attacks,
During the Industrial Revolution in Britain, factory workers also developed a tradition of going to the beach in wakes week. This was originally a local religious festival which each village would hold at a different time, and while it became secularised the timing stayed the same (so it would be a different week in each town). Factories and mines would close down for maintenance and the workers would go to the seaside.
The Lenape, an Algonquin nation, had something called in English “Big Sea Day” which consisted of a day at the shore feasting and celebrating. Many Jersey shore communities celebrate it to this day. After the migration of the Lenape the custom was left to local farmers. Wags referred to it as “Farmer’s Wash Day”.
The author let the context spell that out quite accurately.
I was thinking beachcombers, wreckers? “Isn’t it a nice day, let’s go to the beach and see if we can’t find a bloated corpse to loot for something we can’t afford in our miserable, peat-burning poverty”?
According to my family, in the Philippines not that long ago going to the beach for recreation was just not a thing that was done by locals. The beach was where the poorer people lived and worked. My family would go to the mountains on holiday because it was relatively cooler and less humid up there.
It was only the influence of foreigners and their weird ideas of recreation that made the beach a vacation destination for Filipinos. Lying on the sand to get a tan? How weird is that? Filipinos generally favor fair skin, and view being too brown or black as not as attractive.
Ah, one of those non-wimpy maritimers, I see. I stuck to the warmer lakes and left the Atlantic alone.
Ugh! Swim in fresh water? Sink like a stone!
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