Street theatre.

Early summer blog 2025. We’ve just taken a short break away from home as both of us needed some time away from our respective jobs : Jackie’s job is obviously a real one as she still works for the NHS while I continue to be a man of leisure and use my time in hacking away at the clay subsoil of the old workshop floor. On that front I got the first 5 yard skip load out just before we went away so the first part of the first job is now two thirds of the way through although it’s just hit a MOAB ….(Mother of all boulders) and I don’t know quite how to deal with it, at the moment it’s so far down that I can’t muscle or lever it out of the base clay – mine explosives and drilling might be the answer but I don’t think i’m allowed to do that**. I have a neat story about that which is possibly even a true one so i’ll throw that in at the end of the post.

I wrote the post, at least mentally prepared most of it ,while we were away and because of where we were, the things that we saw and it being a bank holiday weekend of very good weather I kept having to change the working title I had in mind. Initially it would have run with the working title of ‘Rate my tantrum’ for the several sprogs having total breakdowns when say they were half an hour past time for yet another ice cream treat, then it briefly (no pun intended) it morphed into ‘Rate my buns’ for the number of inadvisably worn G string bikinis on rather fleshy bottoms. The eventual title Street Theatre was the obvious end point given the sheer volume of pale, pasty and flabby Brits of all genders and clothing options.

Weymouth beach isn’t exactly Copacabana (Rio) beach, neither is it Bondi or Manley (Aus) but thankfully nor is it Blackpool : having worked in that side of the service industry called professional sailing I happen to have been and seen many of the famous beaches and the beautiful people that frequent them. I did my SRN training near Blackpool and once made the mistake of going there on a night out – only once mind you. The street theatre of Weymouth beach mostly all happens at the end nearest the town even though it stretches half a mile or more.

Street theatre commenced around 0700 with a Bacon bap and coffee at the excellent Coffee one – quiet at that time of day until the sad and broken people make it out of whatever doss or shop entrance they’ve found for the night. As with other towns on England’s south coast Weymouth does seem to have more than it’s fair share of broken, alcoholic, drug dependent, physically and mentally sick and unemployable people who seem to make some kind of life there. In that respect it’s a lot like Torbay locally which is notorious for alcoholism and low grade drug abuse.

Street theatre ran right through until our last evening when we decided to try the buffet style ‘all you can eat’ Thai/Chinese/Asian restaurant round near the car park. We chose it because it’s what we both had a taste for and the street theatre aspect was fulfilled by several entire families taking up residence and rapidly filling their boots : one family on a table near to us had done 5 heaped platefuls while we were doing just one. I’d not come across this before but there was a ‘rule’ written up that the maximum eating time allowed was 90 minutes – I dread to think how many Kcal the FFB family could pack away in that time.

Tantrums, bad parenting, drunkenness and sheer wanton greed aside I did get to do a lot of reflecting about how this beach, this town and it’s harbor has book ended a large part of my life : given my physical limitations in exercise it was best that Jackie went off and had a good walk while I kicked back and watched the action play out in front of me.

I first came here all of 60 years ago and today I could see myself in the small freckled/ginger kid that was gleefully running around in and out of the shallows minus any clothing – a short while later his parents had to chase him down and then all but pin him down to get him back into clothes. Now of course i’m at the complete opposite end of the spectrum, more like the tea and pee brigade photographed above enjoying what might be their last season of fun in the sun plus ice cream.

There was a point today when the obviously foreign crew of a visiting yacht walked through and seeing it all through their eyes (Dutch I think) it was as though they were visiting a particularly rowdy zoo – the kind of zoo with lots of Baboon’s bottoms on display.

Seven year old me was either in the sea or exploring around the harbor – Don’t worry, I most likely had clothes on, because I was : one, quite an independent kid that preferred his own company and two, that I was fascinated by visual detail. What I remember was the grungy, salty and rusty detail of the few working fishing boats still based there. I do remember seeing a well kept sailing ship there once, if memory serves then it was either Belle Etoile or Belle Poule – both of them sailing training vessels from the French navy. In recent years I had an impromptu race with one or other of them : whichever one it was could easily pass me on a reach in any conditions but I spanked them good and hard when it came to short tacking down the Gulet de Brest upwind all the way.

My worst time in Weymouth was during the Covid ‘lockdown’ years and when the harbor master seemed to act as nothing so much as a council parking warden with attitude, the local beach based RNLI were even worse – so called nice responsible adults who reveled in their temporary power and authority.

This was also the place we were staying the first time I got taken to Bovington tank museum where I managed to annoy my long suffering parents by loudly declaring that the big lumpy steel thing they were standing in front of wasn’t a freakin Tiger tank but actually an SDKFZ 173 (that’s a Jagdpanther in case you didn’t know – that kind of thing being super important to a tank nerd of a seven year old (I was obsessed with tanks if you hadn’t guessed)

Sailing boats didn’t become an essential part of my life until many years later and even I can’t easily explain where that obsession came from as nobody in our family came from a seafaring background. I didn’t visit Weymouth much as a sailor because in truth a bit out of the way and often a bit difficult to get to due to the presence of Portland Bill – that and Lyme bay which I consider to be more of a problem than the quick dash around the Bill itself.

**My story about boat/hotel owners, boulders and explosives.

If there are single words that could describe one skipper that I sailed with several times it would have to be something like eccentric, irascible or maybe just downright difficult and he had absolutely zero time for fools. After one race that I got talked into sailing as his medical officer he gave up sailing and bought a hotel down in the west country : if that sounds a bit like Fawlty Towers then that’s about right. The way I heard it is that one day he decided to do something about some large boulders that were slightly blocking the hotel’s drive only in this case he acquired a load of old flares and used the explosive mixture to make his own blasting sticks and had a go at blowing them into manageable chunks. Again, the way I hear it is that the police and an exlposive disposals team from the Royal navy all got involved and our man was lucky not to get charged with a serious offence under terrorism legislation – he apparently just found the whole thing hugely funny.