Let’s face it: you shouldn’t have to walk down a beach in the snow. It feels wrong, unnatural. It feels like the opposite of a holiday. An anti-holiday. This snow isn’t just the gentle tumbling stuff you see on Christmas cards either, it’s snow as chucked by a knife thrower or fired from a snow cannon. It meets your wrapped-up-warm body and turns it into the inside of a fridge.
Look, who are these three hunched figures moving across the snowy sands like The Wise Men with a broken satnav? It’s Ian McMillan and his wife and their ten-year-old grandson Thomas, who are on a pre-Easter break in Northumberland in their favourite cottage in Beadnell. All week the weather has been alternately sulky and angry; Ian and Thomas have played chess and all three of them have read and watched TV and, when the rain and sleet stopped briefly, they’ve ventured out on to the beach.
This time they took a football; the wind ignored the offside rule and ran all the way down the sands with it to give it an early bath. The snow was like a ticker-tape welcome. For some reason the three of them persisted in trying to play football perhaps because they were from Yorkshire and they’d bought the football and paid for the cottage and they were blooming well going to make use of them both.
The snow continued to fall. The sea, churned up by the wind, boiled and seethed in a genuinely scary way. Ian couldn’t stop imagining himself in a small boat on that snowy ocean. Usually, at this point in a holiday by the sea, Ian will look at the sky that is the colour of a vest rejected by a charity shop and say ‘Do you know, I think it’s clearing up’, much to the derision of those around him. The sky is so indifferent to persuasion today that Ian doesn’t say it. The three snow people walk back to the favourite cottage and turn on the tiny television. They catch (like a chucked snowball) the weather forecast, which is grim. Grimness will fall spasmodically for the next couple of days and there will be a wind so grim it will try its very best to take your hair from your head and replace it on somebody else’s. They have an early lunch of beans on toast, which already, somehow and in a faint kind of way, feels elegiac.
A rite of passage for people as young as our grandson was then and for people as middle-aged as Ian McMillan and his wife were then is the decision to go home early from the seaside holiday. This doesn’t mean the emergency return, through illness or other misfortune, it means the (usually weather-based) moment of saying ‘Look, this isn’t going to work, is it? We may as well go home. It’s not fun just being trapped in the cottage; we can sit in the house at home.’ That snowy morning on the beach more or less convinced my wife and I that we should take that decision.
I don’t know what the clincher was for my wife, but for me it was having to walk, almost bent double, into the gnashing teeth of the snow-decorated wind on the beach that did it. I felt like Captain Scott making his steady way to the North Pole or one of Father Christmas’s reindeer reluctantly walking to the sleigh for the great annual journey. Thomas didn’t seem to mind the wind and I gamely joined in his game of catching snowflakes until we got back to the wonderful otherworldly warmth of the cottage and the wind yodelling down the chimney.
The thing was that my wife and I had arrived at our ‘let’s go home early’ decisions separately and neither of us wanted to tell the other one in case of disappointment. What if one of us wanted to stay? What then?
We sat in the cottage and did a jigsaw that, ironically, was of a sun-kissed rather than snow-snogged beach. As the last piece went in, by some miracle, it stopped snowing. The sun attempted to peep at us and the wind reclassified itself as a breeze. Maybe we wouldn’t go home after all. Maybe it was a good thing that we took the decision separately, because once one of us had said the H word then a spell would have been broken and we would have had to go H.
‘Let’s have a drive into Seahouses and go to the Farne Gift Shop,’ my wife said. The Farne Gift Shop is a treasure chest, an Aladdin’s Cave, the internet with a roof on; it’s everything you’d ever want to buy on a seaside holiday and much more besides. The sun was really out now, not pretending to be out. It was still achingly cold but we put layers on top of our layers and ventured out.
The car park in Seahouses, usually full, was almost empty. Out towards the East I could see that black ink had been spilt across the sky but I didn’t mention it. We scuttled across to the Farne Gift Shop and took our time up and down its packed aisles. I bought a calendar that showed the places we’d been in the past few days but without snow and frost; my wife bought a fridge magnet for her mother. Thomas bought a huge toy car that appeared to spark from its exhaust. It seemed very bright in the shop, which meant it was very dark outside.
We exited into a blizzard that tried to steal my calendar but I hung on to it. We ran back to the car and drove back to the cottage. In the cottage Thomas played with his car and I put the kettle on. It was snowing again.
My wife and I, like people in a film, spoke at the same time. ‘We should go home,’ we said. Outside, the snow agreed.