Mr Grumpy

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By Mr Grumpy - Wed 24th Jul 2013

 

Let me make one thing clear : I hate the beach.

I hate the fact that it is crowded, I hate the fact that it is noisy, I hate the fact that wherever I look I am forced to turn away from the image of either an English guy sporting socks and sandals, a topless French Octogenarian, or worse still, a 20 stone old German guy with a hairy back and wearing nothing more than a thong.

Worse still, I hate the sand.

I despise the way that the sand gets into absolutely everything I wear, read, touch and want to eat or drink, and especially despise the way that I have to swill half the beach from my intimate areas for the next few days.

Like most men, even in the most blistering of heat waves, I neglect to wear suntan cream. Great for avoiding sticky hands, which said beach then sticks to. Not so great when Mrs Grumpy insists that I smother her back in Factor 50, leaving me with perfectly protected hands (and nothing else), with a touch like sandpaper.

Did I mention the fact that real men don’t wear shorts either ? This makes sitting on the beach in a pair of jeans and sandy white hands make me look like some kind of performance artist.

Don’t get me wrong – I like to look at the beach, and like swimming in the wobbly blue thing at the end of it – just not the minefield that lies before it, which can sometimes leave me with a logistical poser. Comparisons with Dunkerque would be highly inappropriate at this juncture.

Sometimes I question why I even moved to Spain, and a village barely 10 Miles from the Beach at that.

I was happy to have forgotten my oddly misplaced phobia, however this all came flooding back yesterday with a seemingly innocuous question posed by Matthew from Gran Canaria Local : Which is better, Swimming in a Rockpool or Swimming Pool ?

Fortunately, in the majority of Towns and Villages up and down Spain, you are never too far away from a Municipal pool. Just my phobia of sitting on grass to overcome now.