ooo, I dooo like to be beside the sea-side.....in hua hin

My first seaside holidays were Whitsun breaks on the Isle of Wight, where my parents had once honeymooned.

A friend and client of my father's, Mr.Horwich - a Horowitz from Bialystock recreating himself as an English hotelier - had acquired the Pier Hotel at Seaview. The eponymous pier had long since been claimed by changing habits of travel and the ferocious appetite of the English Channel, and hardly a strut or beam survived; but the hotel was a beautiful Victorian affair that struggled on into a postwar world. It was wonderful to a child to explore grand staircases and labrynthine corridors, sniff around salt-smelling cellars and wonder at the overwrought balconies and ornate white stucco of the facade, crumbling and eroding in the sea air.

Looking out across the waves, beyond the massive round forts sitting it out in the straits, deterring past and future Napoleons from setting foot on our green and pleasant land, lay Portsmouth beckoning from the mainland. Portsmouth, drear and uninviting, best seen through a marine haze or obscuring summer downpour. Portsmouth, that would reclaim us after our few days' idyll-by-the-sea. With this constant reminder of the quotidian and dull, we frolicked and rollicked for our allotted few days, in a gay abandon.

Many many years later I spent the New Year with friends in the New Forest. So close to childhood haunts, I persuaded the friends to a jaunt on the Island. We motored around on the first day of a fresh year, through Ventnor where I like to believe I was conceived, and on to Seaview where I promised tea at the Pier Hotel. Driving down the final tree-lined slope to the hotel, prelude to past delights, I was flooded by memories. Coming out onto the Esplanade at last there was a shocking, shattering, unbelievable, vacancy. All that remained of the beloved building was a great smashed concrete raft, level with the earth.

***

We never did get round to diving on Koh Tai.
Perhaps it was a subliminal response to the two diving instructors, the one a chain-smoking (I'm sure he'd devised a way of smoking underwater) South African with a partially bleached Mohican, and the other a hefty monosyllabic shaven-headed hulk, with the craggy skull of a Cro-Magnon.
Lovely fellows, but you wouldn't want to meet them under a dark rock.