Pier Review

by Jon Bounds

  We find a table near to a plug socket and use the beer mats to clean off the peanut crumbs and sticky splashes of syrupy pop or lager. I plug the laptop into the wall and chain-charge my mobile too. There's no Wi-Fi, and deep within the windowless hole, little signal for 3G either. I quickly give up and offer to get some drinks. Midge is dozing, wanting nothing but to shut his eyes. Danny wants cider.

  I stand at the bar for about five minutes; there are no staff serving. The indentured youth in their white shirts are tasked with moving burgers and chops, not liquids. The pub is a chain, with neat blackboards announcing the same food you can get in any town in the UK, not locally caught fresh fish or anything we might associate with the seaside. No shellfish, no winkles to be eaten with pins, no reference to anything apart from the price. They offer fish and chips, but they aren't in the slightest bit bothered to advertise which sort they've caught. In an indignant huff I retreat to the table, then go to the toilet, but my conditioned thirst drags me back and I'm able to get us some yellow fizzy. It's not nice.

  Danny is on the phone to Pontins; we're intending to stay at their Southport camp for a night but that's not proving easy. In my youth I remember people joining our holiday party for a night, but booking less than a week on the phone or via the website is impossible. Playing our 'we're writers' card might be the only way in, but trying number after number to reach the press office doesn't seem to be working. They say they'll ring him back. They don't. People he's spoken to are unheard of in the office.

  Finally he says: 'Of course, we'll let you read everything we write before publishing.' A beat. He mouths 'like fuck'.

  I don't think it's going well and my mood is being dragged lower to match everyone else's here.

  * * *

  I'm not a big player of computer games, but due to my addictive nature I did once accidentally play Pokémon on an old colourscreen Game Boy for 50 hours straight. And it has kind of influenced my thinking somewhat. In the world of Pokémon every new town or city you reach will have a Poké centre, in which you can recharge yourself and rest your battle-weary pets. Pubs have long since taken on this role for me. They're a place in real life where, no matter where you are, you can go to regroup, a neutral safe space out of the constant babbling stream of life. Unfortunately Midge, our own little pocket monster, is taking this a little far by actually sleeping. After three days in a car we look like rough sleepers anyway. Midge is helping no one by falling asleep. Of all the behaviours tolerated in a pub, falling asleep is rarely welcomed, so every so often I nudge him with my foot, an act that a casual observer would call a 'kick'. Of course, if there were any staff watching I'm not sure how a homeless fella with long hair kicking his sleeping mate would have looked much better.

  We silently and unconsciously spread out our bathroom trips knowing that, these being the first decent comfortable toilets in a while, we may need some time. Sitting down, I study the spreadsheet for a bit.

  * * *

  I am a huge fan of the band Blur. At their height of thought they created a melancholic Englishness that balanced the nostalgic with a soft personal blanket. 'This Is a Low' is their hymn to the shipping forecast, a radio institution loved for its hypnotic and hypnagogic shopping list of coastal locations. It cuts a blade through that yearning for a past you've never experienced; it helps to connect you with the world – to share the ennui. It'll be okay, we all feel like this. That's what makes times like this bearable, that others feel the same.

  * * *

  'Errrrrrm, guys…' I begin, back in the car and looking over the top of my laptop.

  'That doesn't sound good,' says Jon, looking round from the front seat.

  'What?' shouts Midge.

  The music is loud in the front because there are no speakers in the back. Both Jon and Midge go to turn the music down, their fingers touch, both hands recoil slightly and Jon finally turns it down.

  'Well, remember the spreadsheet? The one with all the piers and dates on it?' I begin. I have no idea how they're going to take this.

  'Yeah.'

  'Well, all the nights where we sleep somewhere are highlighted red.'

  'Okay,' says Jon.

  We both know he's only glanced in passing at the schedule.

  'Well… I forgot one.'

  'What?'

  'I missed one, I'm looking at it here, I forgot one.'

  'What does that mean?' shouts Midge, clearly struggling to listen to me, the satnav and concentrate on the road.

  'Well, we're going to be away an extra night. Instead of getting home Friday it'll be Saturday. Twelve days is now the quickest we can do this.'

  Jon shrugs, Midge says nothing.

  'Well, we've got two weeks,' says Jon, 'is that okay for you, Midge?'

  'I've got nowhere I'm supposed to be. As long as I'm back for Monday for the dole I'm all right,' says Midge.

  'Well, that's all right then,' I say, as I highlight that particular row red and add an extra day of piers to my life.

  * * *

  A short trip up the coast, and barely out of town as such, we park right on the seafront next to Boscombe Pier. Sand is being blown into intricate concentric curves along the camber of the fresh, black road. This end of town is quiet and low-rise, and we're nestled in the crook of heathery cliff and beach. There's a glassfronted bistro opposite us and there's a comfortingly middle-class smell of garlic. It's really unlikely that we'll get to eat or drink anywhere nice on this trip, and that's for a few reasons. One is that we're attempting to revisit our past and these sorts of places just didn't exist when we were younger. Another is that we have very little money for sustenance. But the real reason is that none of us will admit to wanting to be comfortable. We're working-class heroes, at least on the surface, and I'm not sure any of us will want to be the one to break cover first. To request hummus rather than ironic candyfloss. I am tempted, though.

  I've not been making many notes in the car itself, relying on either the sameness or the shock to preserve the right memories from the bits in between stops. In the eight minutes from the municipal car park in Bournemouth to the panini belt of Boscombe's beach we pass through St Swithun's Roundabout, whereupon a flood of related memories pour down through the gap in the roof next to the radio aerial, like the rain sometimes does. Not memories about the supposed saint himself, or the weather-related superstition, more the Billy Bragg song 'St Swithin's Day' and Dubstar's cover version. Billy Bragg, known as the Bard of Barking, isn't someone who should really fit the coastal theme of the book but at his most personal his songs do speak of the clear water before overcommercialisation. This song in particular is political only in the most self-political way – it is a song of loss and memory, which is fitting for us. I've seen Billy do it live recently, and he makes reference to the film of the book – David Nicholls' One Day – that's supposedly based upon the song. The film One Day doesn't have the song 'St Swithin's Day' on its soundtrack because of the 'blatant wank reference'. Even the most sensitive of yearnings eventually leads your hands to 'make love' to a memory.

  * * *

  At this point I've become quite a dab hand at writing the countless postcards in the car. I am never able to remember the addresses, though. Even after writing a lot of them I still have to pull up the addresses on a tiny spreadsheet from my phone, a process that makes me inexplicably cross each time I do it. So I don't notice the sun as it creeps out from behind diminishing clouds, nor the suburbs slowly fading away into rolling countryside. This is probably why Boscombe is my favourite pier, the magical transformation from dull modern pier in a city by the sea to beautifully minimal modernist pier on a beach with blazing sunshine highlighting the difference between the two.

  BOSCOMBE

  Opened: 1889 (Architect: Archibald Smith, additions by John Burton in 1960)

  Length at start: 600 ft (183 m)

  Length now: 750 ft (229 m)

  Burn baby burn? No, but was breached for defence purposes during World War Two.

>   The first pile was driven into the seabed by Lady Shelley, daughterin-law of Percy Bysshe Shelley. The skeleton of a 65-ft whale that had been washed up on a nearby beach in 1887 was displayed on the pier for several years, and often used as a slide by local children. The pier 'resembles an enlarged bus shelter', according to pier expert Cyril Bainbridge, author of Pavilions on the Sea.

  Boscombe Pier seems to be intended to be a memory of itself. It's got a fine line in modernist lettering, and it's minimalist in its descriptions: Ices, Stores, Diner, Take Away. And in a typeface suspended from the swooping shade – a light Helvetica, I suspect – are the simple words 'Boscombe Pier'. Even the postcards here are well designed, if not cheap enough for us to buy any. Everything is in keeping with the birth of the modern era, the taste of a new generation. Have you ever been to an art-deco Harvester before?

  * * *

  Designer bod Wayne Hemingway describes Boscombe Pier as 'one of the coolest piers in the country'. What I like about that is the inherent hedging of his bets in that statement, in case someone else might chime in and point out a slightly cooler pier to Wayne and he doesn't want to be caught out. Let's face it, no one but a very special type of fan or a certain type of idiot is going to visit enough piers to be able to contradict that statement. And being that very special type of idiot, I can confirm that Boscombe is in fact one of the coolest in the country. It's no wonder that Wayne, sort of, picked it.

  Revived in the sixties by the borough's architect John Burton in the modernist style and shored up with concrete, it is indeed impressive – from the sweeping roof, looking like the wings of a fifties spaceship, to the black-and-white tiling of the entrance, even extending to the font used for the 'REEFSIDE ICES'. Both me and Jon, as design whores and font freaks, enjoy this greatly and, with no sense that it might be weird, stand taking photographs of the font, much to the confusion of the shopkeepers.

  * * *

  There's nothing on the pier as such, just benches and the ability to look away. Sky is blue, sea is green. I ponder again why we give so much meaning to the sea. Dirt is just where you are; the water is a huge blob of romance. Here, as the sun sets, there are loving couples of all ages. The older ones are sweet. Love is free and can't be taken away, only thrown away. The ultimate working-class commodity.

  Though we stood together by the edge of the platform, we were not moved by them.

  Honest.

  * * *

  Boscombe Pier is pretty desolate. It once hosted a theatre and roller rink. Now it is just a concrete platform jutting out to sea, bisected by a windowed windbreak in the middle, but it is nice. It could be the weather or the genuine vibe of love for the place. You can feel the pride of the little seaside town focused on this modernist quirk of our culture and it feels nice to share it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WIGHT HERE, WIGHT NOW

  For such a small island, the Isle of Wight has an inordinate number of ferry services. The first that we come to leaves from Lymington. The process is surprisingly low-key. It's like a traffic jam or festival car park: you arrive at the port and really have no indication of whether people are waiting to board or just parking up. There's something inherently light and disorganised about the whole process.

  Without really knowing what to do, we stop driving and I drag Danny along for moral support to what I think must be the ticket office. It's stark and tiled. Jacketed smiles sit behind protective glass. There's an expanse of white grid flooring and a confusing lack of queuing or activity. I hesitantly negotiate some sort of open return ticket. It costs a lot – £60 or more.

  We get back in the car and in a couple of minutes a guy in a hivis jacket starts beckoning us forward. Up a clanking ramp, and then into exactly the right place on the deck. We have to stay in the car until some light goes on or some door closes.

  For those of us in our working-class thirties the ferry was usually the first way we'd leave home soil, maybe on the sort of short trip we're taking now: to France or one of the British Isles. All of the journeys work in the same way: wonder at the engineering solution of packing the cars and people so tightly, then wonder at the shape-cut doors and the way your body feels a different weight. And boredom.

  * * *

  Ferries are slow, almost glacially so. Almost immediately we head to the canteen and buy cans of lager. A nagging part of my psyche wants to be wearing Union Flag boxer shorts and throw some plastic furniture around. I quell this class group memory and sit down to enjoy a particularly interesting item in the free magazine about the garlic farm on the island.

  I know almost nothing about the Isle of Wight. I honestly couldn't have pointed to it on a well-labelled map before I started planning the route. I was sure that there was an island off Britain that was a weirdo tax haven but that was more likely to be the Isle of Man, and I knew a friend of mine had worked there for a summer (his verdict: 'fucking boring as shit'). I also know Dean lives on the island. I've never met Dean but Jon seems confident in how well he knows him and has said there is a place for us to stay, a fact I appreciate even after only one night spent under canvas.

  * * *

  For Danny and me the boredom comes straight away, sitting opposite each other at a window table. Midge's comes either before that, as he continues away from us to the upper deck, or when he returns to sit and talk.

  We exhaust the entertainment options quickly. Like any space where the public are regularly trapped without distraction – life's waiting rooms – someone will eventually come up with a plan to shovel media at them. Posters become leaflets become advertorial magazines become rotating plasma screens. Content has to be rootless and free of time – because it costs, costs to update – so it becomes nothing so much as a mulch.

  Midge is bored, restless, and under-breaths 'fuck off' at a crying child, but in our direction. I ignore it.

  We compare the blue of the cans to the blue-green of the sea and make notes. We've been rumbling along for at least 20 minutes and don't really seem to have left the mainland. Scrubby outcrops are still sauntering by as I contemplate the isle ahead.

  * * *

  The slowness of the ferry and the bright sunshine are sapping any momentum we have built up today, as are the cans of booze me and Jon put away on the crawl over the water. The deadline of 'no driving in the dark' hangs over us. We have four piers to hit before meeting Dean and it gets dark about an hour after we dock.

  * * *

  There's a pier in Yarmouth, and it's less than ten yards from where we get off the ferry. Midge heaves the car into a bay and we waste no time at all ticking it off the list.

  On our spreadsheet, which we can now only see intermittently because it's on the Internet rather than on a piece of paper in the glovebox, Danny has put an 'info' column. He had sat and looked for information on each pier: adding postal addresses, contact details and, in one or two cases, entrance fees. It had never occurred to me that you might have to pay to go onto a pier. They were, I thought, nothing more than palaces of consumerism – arcades, food – so that entry fees would have been as odd as having an entry fee to the supermarket or the pub.

  Yarmouth Pier has an entry fee of 30p, but no real way of enforcing it. No gate, no volunteer, just a cast-iron tub in which to slip your coins. I dig through my shrapnel and start putting in our contribution. For some reason the idea of paying to get onto what is evidently little more than a boardwalk turns Midge off. He wanders off over the crumbling tarmac and down the side of the pier towards the beach. We press on. To nothing much.

  YARMOUTH, Isle of Wight

  Opened: 1876 (Architects: Denham and Jenvey)

  Length at start: 685 ft (209 m)

  Length now: 609 ft (186 m)

  Burn baby burn? No, but has been hit by drifting boats a couple of times.

  Originally built to dock steamers from the English mainland, which is 'amusingly' known as the North Island by locals, it provided a base for all sorts of transport. In the nineteenth century it was quicke
r to travel by steamer from Yarmouth to Cowes than to go by carriage. The Isle of Wight road system has improved. A bit.

  It's 'still the longest timber pier in England open to the public', which doesn't sound like much but, given that the constant attacks by gribble worm mean that the timbers always need replacing, that's some achievement. Housewives' favourite Alan Titchmarsh has led the most recent battle to keep the structure safe.