Qaurteira (and the distant stare)

The restaurant on the sea front is closed. Sun-bleached photos of English and German meals are still on the wall outside. White plastic chairs dusted green from salt winds stacked away never to bear an overweight hammy arse again. Outside, a poorly painted goldfish stares cross-eyed. Mobility scooters murmur past. 

At the hotel check in desk, a woman is annoyed at the suggestion its her first time staying there.

They come here in twos. Retired. A life behind them. They sit on benches staring out to the sea in different directions. The sea ignores them. Wave upon wave upon wave rolling onto the sand before sharply inhaling back into the sea again. The wind whips off the water and the secret heat it hides throws sea salt and sand to erode  the heyday off the life of this frontier of land and water. This is the sea’s land. Just as it erodes rock into sand, it will claim this place that is aging with its visitors until one day there is nothing and no-one here.

They stare out to sea. I wonder if they see their lives when they look out, Zoe-troping glories and stubborn regret. Perhaps they’re just thinking about what they’re going to eat for tea, or just enjoying quietness. 

The evening is an occasion, but there is a visible sadness to them sitting together in either quiet restaurant rooms or to rooms loudened by local singers playing the songs of their youth. The ghosts of youth reverberate around these walls. 

And then there is me and Fiona sat among them. Even the waiters and barmen seem to sense like white blood cells that we’re in the wrong room. We’ve come here to remember what summer looks like in the midst of winter. Its not warm enough for us to dress for summer though and perhaps we stand out against everyone else dressed for holiday despite the weather. 

I can imagine a future where we can buy into VR experiences, and this was the budget sun-seeking experience we ordered off Amazon. Like all budget companies, there would be add-ons: the bars and restaurants appearing as they would in the decade of your choice, the temperature as you want it, a degree to how interested waiters and barmen are in you, the songs the singer-guitarist plays in the corner of the room - everything obstructing the cold slap of the reality of age and time. 

Next to our hotel was a building that seemed abandoned. It had been a hotel, a bowling alley, a bar and an estate agent. It was beautifully designed. Like how we imagine buildings on desert planets: curved and porous rock wall surfaces like coral, but the business had fallen out of the building. Now the once resplendent signs were ripped and faded. A skinny cat sat in the window and migrant workers lived in the building’s decay. 

I feel that Fiona and me are unique in our admiration for a time that came before us and a sadness  in its decay. And perhaps a feeling that the generation that inherited an era of a great rebuild after an intensely short period of destruction didn’t understand the opportunity that they had and the responsibility that they had. Instead, they clumsily enjoyed generous lending and a pervasive affordability that no future generation will likely see again. This probably explains the lack of sympathy I feel in the fumbling of life on display in the karaoke bar.