THE HUNSTANTON FRISBEE INCIDENT

Here he is, Jolly Old Ian McMillan, so jolly that he was once called ‘relentlessly jolly’ by the Guardian and so jolly about being called ‘relentlessly jolly’ by the Guardian that he put the quote on the business cards he had printed. He’s jolly because he’s on his holidays with his young family at the North Norfolk resort of Hunstanton. The sun is a beach ball; the sky is a summer dress.

The McMillan family have been to the slot machines and watched 2p pieces obeying or not obeying the laws of gravity. They’ve attempted to grab cuddly toys from a pile of cuddly toys with the aid of a grabber. They’ve bought souvenir rock for relatives and schoolfriends. There’s a mist of sadness behind the jollity because this is the last day of the holiday when everything seems at once very close and really far away; here are times that will never come again, here are moments that will only ever exist as photographs or stories. And all the stories will soon be in the past imperfect tense.

For now, though, the jollity is winning out and Jolly Old Ian McMillan is being jollier than ever in an attempt to ward off the melancholy that might truly descend when the cottage has to be cleaned up later. Ian McMillan decides to do a daft thing; he decides to run along the beach going Whoooooo. The kids laugh and Ian’s wife laughs kindly at the always eager-to-please clown she married all those years ago.

The man in the picture, the man in the Ian mask, is not built for running along the beach; these days he has slimmed down quite a lot but at the time we’re calling Hunstanton Time he was a big unit. He took up quite a bit of North Norfolk. He is running because he feels it is his parental duty to be jolly and happy and make other people happy and jolly and so he runs to make people happy. A bit like Alf Tupper did.

The sun is still a beach ball; the sky is still a summer dress. At the other end of the beach there’s another family. The McMillans have seen them around and the kids are the same age and the parents seem to be around the same age as McMillan and Wife, to quote the name of an old American TV show that used to tauntingly follow Jolly Ian around at school. ‘Where’s yer wife? Hey, it’s McMillan and…’

The man of the family is not like Jolly I. He is tall and often shirtless and the shirtlessness shows off his muscles. He looks like a relief map of himself. During the week he has nodded at Ian with a nod that combines pity with a gleaming cheerfulness that he is not shaped like Jolly I. In his head Ian calls this gent The Muscle Man. Is Ian jealous? No, he is content to be jolly. Oh, come on; is Ian jealous of the man’s torso and legs and arms? Well, he’s a combination of jealous and jolly. He’s Jealolly, which looks on the page a bit like a representation in language of the way Ian McJolly’s man-breasts shiver and shake as he walks. Or in this case as he runs down the beach.

The Muscle Man is about to throw a Frisbee in such a way that his tattoos will be like animations. Of course he is about to throw a Frisbee. The sea is a still mirror and a gull whirls like a sixteenth-century automaton and TMM is going to chuck a Frisbee-shaped hole into this timeless diorama. Some people are fans of Frisbees and see them as harmless mid-Atlantic fun but Ian McJolly isn’t one of these. You can call him a miserable bugger if you like but there’s something performative and showy-off about Frisbees that rubs Ian’s library-loving heart up the wrong way. For I McJ, the Frisbee is the equivalent of The Muscle Man’s pectoral mountains.

The children are still laughing though as their daft dad runs; maybe it is better to be a daft dad at the seaside than an oiled Adonis of a father. Discuss: or rather don’t, because the Frisbee is about to reach warp speed. It’s the last day of the holiday and tomorrow will be the long slow car trip home and the picnic in the lay-by and the silence that slowly spills over into a badly rehearsed fractiousness.

Jolly Ian is now seriously out of breath and he is wheezing huge creaking wheezes. His face is a beef tomato. He sweats fire buckets.

The Frisbee floats towards him and in certain lights it could be a spaceship containing intelligent multicellular and vortex-brained beings that have come to explore Hunstanton with a view to setting up coastal fish farms. Ian McMillan’s run has slowed to a walk, then an amble, then a stumble, then something that is almost stasis. The Frisbee is getting closer. One of the kids, the youngest one, the boy who will become a prize-winning poet, shouts ‘Dad!’ Muscle Man shouts ‘Watch it mate!’ and even his voice is so strong it has a six-pack and could lift saloon cars.

Jolly, jolly Ian McMillan couldn’t move out of the way of the Frisbee even if he wanted to. Above him the sky darkens. There’s a whisper of something whizzing through the air. Almost at the last moment Ian McJ looks up and then wishes he hadn’t looked anywhere as the Frisbee clonks him on the bonce.

Ian leans over and begins to sway palm-in-a-breezishly. He is partly acting, it’s true, but the Frisbee collision hurt quite a bit. His swaying becomes more exaggerated until he is The Leaning Tower of Ian. The kids don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The Muscle Man’s Mouth is a big muscular O. Ian’s wife looks worried.

Only Ian knows if he’s really hurt. It’s the last day of the holidays. He decides to keep them guessing. It’ll be something to talk about on the journey home.