Where shall we go next year?

We spend our summer holiday in the same place every year, is it time for a change?

It usually happens on day nine, occasionally on ten. I cannot recollect it ever occurring on eight. “Where shall we go next year?” my wife asks as we messily breakfast. We feast on wallet crippling croissant, cinnamon swirls and a mushy melange of maple and pecan, all purchased from the chi chi bakery on the High Street, sandwiched between a posh pie emporium and the Tiptree Jam shop. I hasten to add we only consume such Francophone morning meals when on holiday, it adds a continental butter heavy twist to this most English of fortnights, spent in that most English of coastal resorts -Southwold. “Where shall we go next year?” she repeats, feigning I have failed to hear her question, yet empathetically understanding that my lack of communication is Adnams induced rather than any partial or complete deafness- four pints of Mosaic and a bottle of their own brand Muscadet to be precise – along with patisserie and sand in the bed, hangovers are a holiday staple.

‘Where shall we go next year?’ is a near rhetorical question in the Negus household. It has become a given we will holiday in Southwold- a mere 35 miles due east from our home amid the rippling Mid Suffolk fields of wheat, barley and oil seed rape. (Admittedly there is very little rippling going on at home at the moment, rain has done for harvest what it does for sunbathing here by the sea.) We are multi-repeat visitors to this old Town, clinging to the arse end of England for a multitude of reasons, but mainly because it is home. It is my family seat, not in any Ducal sense, my earthy breed have lived and grafted here since at least the 17^th century according to the parish records - fishing and sailing, building and woodworking away. My maternal side are as Southwold as St Edmunds Church, the Lighthouse or the Water Tower (one of my grandfather’s brothers was the keeper of the latter. He died in it, mangled by the machinery) My family helped build this place both physically and metaphorically. Like most proper Southwoldians nearly all of them left years ago, cashing in on their cramped squat white wash cottages, selling them on to the new breed of Southwoldians - bankers and media types mainly. The new Southwoldians dress as they imagine sailors, carpenters and fishermen should dress. It is all too easy for we old Southwoldians to mock the new, as they promenade slowly and confidently to dine at the Swan, sporting pastel slacks, nubuck loafers and stone washed Quba smocks. It is simplicity itself to sneer at their glistening electric cars, admittedly not so much fun when the silent running bastards run over your foot as you cross the road near the blind bend at Tibby’s Green. Yet, without these cash rich, time poor incomers, dear old Southwold would most likely have gone the way of Lowestoft a dozen miles or so up the coast. No pastels there, it is Primark and the cars are clapped out, with exhaust pipes like dustbins. In Lowestoft the air smells of skunk rather than skate, pan fried in black butter. Our coastal towns are precarious places. Style up and you thrive, carry on as you were and you die. Southwold has survived because Southwold was sufficiently pragmatic, accepting that whilst you cannot eat scenery, you can flog it, for good money, to unsuspecting folks who drive Teslas and know their way around a spreadsheet.

Whilst Southwold may no longer be awash with my yokel, local kith and kin, it continues to draw us back for a fortnight each year like a siren’s call. We care not one jot that Jack Wills has sanitised the local dress code, or the Water Tower is now a quirky holiday des-res rather than a monolithic memorial to Great Uncle George. Southwold simply remains, different yet the same. Therefore when my wife asks that question on day nine or ten, it is with a comforting sense that we know the answer will be “here”. Yet this year, I shunned the norm. “Where shall we go next year?” Through a fug of Mosaic and croissant flake I replied “The Isle of Wight looks nice, or how about Guernsey?” My wife spent an hour scrolling through Google images of these two Isles on her phone – Southwold achieved high speed broadband two years before we got it in Mid Suffolk, instigated no doubt by those influential smock wearing senior TV executives hereabouts.

We left my suggestion hanging, deciding that a dog walk would clear both synapses and holiday destination thought processes. Southwold does dogs well. There is a Common, a heath and marshes. The harbour end of the beach offers year round opportunities to eat rotting crab limbs at the high tide mark and most people put a bowl of water at the end of their garden path, should any passing mutt need a refresher. Dogs here are similarly reflective of the urbanely urban turn the Town has made. Moth eaten gundogs such as mine, or half wild matelot’s collies are rarities these days -replaced by hypoallergenic mops, with hybridised names ending in poo. Yet, the spirit of the Town imbues dogs, as it does largely to the humans, with a relaxed air. The growling faux fighting of day one swiftly dissipates into tail wagging bonhomie due, I believe, to the calming influence that sand and sea water brings to most dogs – bar those odd looking French things that can’t breathe without veterinary assistance, Napoleonic in their persistent belligerence.

We cut across the Common, crushing citrus scented bracken underfoot, gorse pods snap in the welcome sun, hotly reappearing after an unwelcome rain shower. Our Spaniels snuffle in the scrub, rabbits are back for now, who knows when Myxi and VHD will wipe them all out again? Egrets make splashes of guano white out on the grazing marshes, stark contrast among the creamery coloured cattle and loden green water meadows. My grandmother would never walk this path; she was an incomer herself in 1919, hailing from Surrey where cows were rare and therefore scary. We shun the peeling sign “To the Town” and hang right to the Harbour. We meander along the tow path, the Blyth is on the turn, running swiftly out to sea. Our younger spaniel, named after the river, sniffs at a crab pot washed up on the last tide, her mother Mabel shuns the scent being wiser and worldlier. We buy cockles and sprinkle salt and vinegar on them, delighting in the taste of the sea and the sandy grit that grates on back molars. ‘The Crofter’ is moored up, my cousin’s little trawler, he will have worked a day already, fishermen keep ungodly hours governed by the tide and requirements of the fish merchants at Billingsgate and Lowestoft. Past the Lifeboat station, we hit the sands of beach and the dogs hit the sea, racing the surf and daring to dunk their heads beneath the waves, rising out of the foam with pendulous ears dripping and dreadlocked. They race to dry off accompanied by Charlie our son. The dogs always win the sprint, but Charlie doesn’t mind. Up the slope at Gunhill, “Come to heel” I mutter spying one of those French dogs. “Morning” we nod, smiling to its owners. They stare fixedly ahead, clearly this must be their first day of the holidays, give them a week and they’ll be happily chatting to strangers like the rest of us, Southwold demands you do that. Nip along the High Street, and sharp right through Bank Alley, one of the few thoroughfare’s still paved with black ironstone cobbles. The whole Town was once so shod, but trip hazards and expensive litigation is very much the stuff of the new Southwoldians, therefore well pointed modern slabs replace those old death traps. Next St Edmund’s church rears overhead, the porch clad in scaffolding. In my mind’s eye I see my parents standing before it on their wedding day in 1952, my mother’s veil blowing horizontally in a nor’ easterly, which as any Southwoldian will tell you comes straight from Siberia. We get back to our little rental cottage, gentrified by some interior designer or other, far removed now from its original designation as a home for workers, one of the Town’s corporation houses - the table in the shabby chic shaker kitchen is still dressed with croissant crumb. The ever present sound of gulls crying from their eyries on slate grey house roofs that cluster around echo through the open windows and the dogs lap water as if water was in short supply. Our backsides sink into sagging sofas strewn with tasteful cushions, a stray wet suit and sand, with a tiredness that only sea air strolls can induce. “Where shall we go next year?” Charlie asks. My wife and I reply as one. “Oh, I think Southwold again, don’t you?”