A Day at the Beach

There are many great debates in life. Is our primary responsibility to ourselves or the wider world? Do we really exist? Is Man inherently greedy or has the world made him that way? And are Manchester United the hand tool of the devil, or is that just their nickname?

But the greatest debate of all is between Creationism and Evolution. George Bush and assorted other whackos believe that we were created 6,000 years ago, more or less fully formed. Dinosaurs it seems, are a relatively recent occurrence, only dieing out when they made the mistake of meeting in Ireland for a conference and were exposed to eight weeks of wet weather in a row, in what they had thought was summer.

I lean towards Evolution, if only because the preponderance of tattoos indicates that some people are still climbing the evolutionary tree. I believe that we came from the sea millions of years ago as slimy green amoeba, in the manner of that Guinness Ad. I felt some of this evolutionary trail in myself last Saturday morning as my condition resembled a slimy green amoeba in all but physical form. It seems strange then, that as soon as the sun comes out, we strive to insult our ancestors by diving back into the sea. Or not, as the case may be, because Melbournians seem to share a trait with their Irish cousins. If the mercury rises above 25c, they will tear down to the beach, change into ill-fitting swimming costumes, play father against son football, eat sand infested sandwiches and allow their dogs to defecate everywhere. Then they will climb back into their cars and drive home. Leaving the sea untouched and alone. Like someone’s tongue left hanging on the phone.

For the sea here shares an important quality with the one that cuddles Ireland. It’s bloody cold. Next stop from here is Antarctica after all. It’s not as cold as legend would suggest however. You don’t exactly have to crack the ice to get in or down a bottle of vodka for courage. But Melbourne beaches suffer in comparison to others found in Australia, such as in Queensland or even Sydney. Nevertheless, I prefer to make the most of what I’ve got and consider the best beach to be any I can walk to.

Elwood Beach fits that description. St Kilda beach is closer, but it suffers from an excess of skangers and sugar fuelled kids at the weekend. Elwood is altogether classier, boasting as it does a marina and a genuine Italian ice cream van. On Sunday the mercury hit 34c and a sirocco wind percolated off the Victorian plains. Apparently it was the 9th hottest October day in history here. It was certainly the hottest October day I’ve ever experienced, but I am of course a Northern Hemisphere flunkie.

So I donned my shorts and headed for the beach, to see if this legendary Australian surf culture lived up to expectations. Sadly it didn’t. When I got there I was attacked by several million flies that had clearly hibernated for the winter before hatching a plan to attack the first milk-bottle white homo-sapien they met. The only way you could get rid of them was to dive into the water, which makes it even more surprising that so few people were swimming. After I’d rid myself of the flies by achieving 30 seconds of mild hyperthermia in the ocean, I took to wondering why we are obsessed with the beach experience. Apart from the flies, you have to put up with sand getting everywhere. Every time you wash it out from between your toes, you realise that God wasn’t that clever in his design of the world. He made a purpose built sand washer called the ocean. And then put a load of sand between you and your shoes, so that your toes are full of the stuff the second after you step out of the sea.
Then there is the fact that there are more kids running around than at a Barney Concert and you’ll usually have at least one of them staring at you as you go through the spectacularly ungraceful process of trying to take wet shorts off and dry your nether regions on a packed beach. Add to this the blazing sun, from which the beach offers no shelter, the jellyfish and the fugitives from health inspection known as Hot Dog stands. And all in all, it can be a pretty soul destroying experience.

Yet every time the sun comes out and winks at us, we fall back into its spell. We join the traffic jams, we wear bad clothes, and we expose parts of our body to the public that we would normally reserve for lovers and doctors. It’s like an ancient God and we must respect its call. Like some primal pull towards an older and more spiritual home. Like our evolutionary fore-fathers are calling us back to where it all began.

Or maybe we just like looking at members of the opposite sex with little or no clothes on. But that great debate is for another day.