REMEMBRANCE AS AN AVOIDANCE OF REALITY

This may require some explanation.
When I saw this image on a visit to one of my favorite websites – If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats – my memory was forcibly prodded into a long-gone haze of what could only have been late infancy, or at least to a time when I had just started to read. I can recall such posters on the platforms of British railway stations as my mother and I waited for the 10.25 to grandmother’s house (change at Paddington) and destinations of that ilk. Even as a child, I can recall finding something insinuatingly grotesque about the ancient fat mariner leaping a sand puddle and a starfish in his rolled down boots, and the slogan “It’s SO bracing!” I think the poster alone was enough to engender an innate and lifelong resolve to avoid Skegness unless actually paid to go there. I’m sure it’s a very nice town, but the poster was just too much.
I have much clearer memories of teenage, Goon Show/Bonzo Dog shock parody my with school buddies whenever the name Skegness was mentioned, and our dismay at what had once been our oppressed elders’ benighted idea of enjoyment. To advertise a vacation resort as “bracing” was surely only something the English, in the pre-Elvis cultural poverty of the 1950s, could come up with. The idea that one might find satisfaction walking in a raw wind that was whipping of the North Sea, after blowing all the way from the frozen fiords – with nothing more than pints of stout and mild, cod and chips, and the Beverly Sisters at the Pier Pavilion after the exercise – was incalculable to a generation that aspired to cocktails in semi-tropical cabana while girls in Brigitte Bardot bikinis walked by. Even that early there was a vast gulf of consciousness.

But why do I bring up all these yesterdays, and why now? I guess because this is the last Sunday of idleness until the full horror of 2009 really kicks in. Tanks are supposedly rolling into Gaza, another fire is being extinguished with gasoline, more slaughter is underway, but I’m trying to avoid thinking about that – and all the other New Year slings and arrows – for another 24 hours.

The secret word is Coward