Some people have no sense of occasion. Take the Medical Students Association and their ‘Reach on a Beach’ campaign. Apparently the idea is for students to go round beaches telling people how terrible exposure to the sun is, how to recognise possible signs of skin cancer, and how to quit smoking.
What I viciously dislike is a beach where all the usual regulations and conditions apply- Mark-Anthony Falzon
To which I’d say two things. first, that summer holidays are there to be enjoyed.
Medical students study very hard indeed and I find it strange that they should choose to spend the little free time they have foisting unasked-for consultations on unsuspecting bathers. The mental-health risks of overexposure to medicine, or anything else really, are well known and medical students would do well to heed them.
The second thing has to do with beaches themselves. There’s a reason why we usually sit or lie down facing the sea rather than the other way round.
Beaches are generally thought to be places of leisure where we can give our backs to it all for a while. it takes some cheek to spoil it all with lectures on how everything kills you.
If medical students will not have their free time at least they can let the rest of us do so.
This may all sound a bit laboured and unnecessarily caustic on what is essentially a group of well-intentioned young men and women. it would be if I stopped there, but I’d like to link it to something rather broader.
Let’s call it the ‘beach experience’, meaning the lived experience of being by the sea rather than say at a shopping centre or a school. Or a doctor’s clinic.
It may already be too late for our few sandy beaches. It’s hardly possible to spend a minute at Għadira or Golden Bay these days without being assaulted by a forest of signs (‘No If’s or Butts!!’ and such misspelt silliness), flags of all colours telling you how likely you are to drown, questionnaires on ‘quality’, and so on.
Text for sand, so to say. Besides, you’re constantly watched over by Baywatch-style ‘lifeguards’, a throwback to nursery school as far as I’m concerned.
The model seems to be that of the Venice Lido in Thomas Mann’s (and later Visconti’s film) Death in Venice. that is to say, a bunch of impeccably-behaved, silent, and motionless children constantly watched over and kept out of harm’s way by a nanny.
And that’s just part of it. We’re told that proper beaches (‘Blue Flag’ or whatever bureaucratic nonsense they’ve come up with) should be fully and easily accessible. if that means easier to reach for people with mobility problems, I agree.
For the average healthy person, however, I’d argue that one of the best things about the beach experience is actually getting there.
The best beach I’ve ever been to was the uninspiringly-named ‘No. 2 Beach’ on Havelock Island in the Andaman Sea. There was coral and turtles and all that, but by far the best thing was the long trek through the forest to get there. it gave you a sense of transition from element to element.
My local substitute is parking the car a couple of hundred metres inland at Delimara.
It may be a few parched fields and rocks but the feeling of changing landscape is profound. Pines give way to tamarisk trees and eventually succulent shrubs. The smell too changes from pine resin to salty air. The effect is magical.
When I compare Golden Bay to say Għajn Tuffieħa next door, I know I get more beach experience at the latter.
On paper, Golden Bay is more accessible and therefore ‘better’ and ‘safer’; in practice, things are rather different.
There’s a bit of a caveat to be made here. my argument could easily go in the direction of romantic nonsense about deserted-beach idylls. But that’s not my point. both Golden Bay and Għajn Tuffieħa are usually crowded.
I have no problem with crowds. I’m comfortable with the idea that beaches should serve as commercial spaces, for example. Visconti’s film would be less atmospheric without the cries, in dialetto Veneto, of beach vendors at Lido, and I rather like the idea of people hawking towels and African carvings and whatnot on a beach in Malta.
It’s also heart-warming to think that beach barbeques have in recent years become one of the main venues for families and friends to get together during the summer months. like I said, my point is not that I want the beach to myself.
What I do viciously dislike is a beach where all the usual regulations and conditions apply, so to say. That’s where all sorts of busybodies bore you with talk of safety and health hazards and wholesome eating and the dividends of sport.
It’s where ‘landscaping’ has obliterated rough walks over the dunes or stones and where bulldozers daily remove the debris of alka (Neptune Grass) lest a wayward strand bother your toes.
The artificial stretch at St George’s Bay, for example, is held up as a model beach. I should rather think of it as a model to avoid, a sanitised and manicured space which leaves you without a hint of what the beach experience is.
The Medical Students Association should be told.
<a href="http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20110911/opinion/We-shall-nanny-them-on-the-beaches.384229tag:news.google.com,2005:cluster=http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20110911/opinion/We-shall-nanny-them-on-the-beaches.384229Sun, 11 Sep 2011 06:26:56 GMT 00:00">We shall nanny them on the beaches
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