Memories of the seaside.

When I was a child my parents often took me and my slightly younger brother to the seaside. My grandfather on my father’s side had a modest villa in the Belgian dunes, called Golden Sand. I still remember the smell of waxed wood and coffee. It had one of those straw roofs. And a lush garden that was in a sort of pit. I remember lying on my belly observing insects scurrying among the sparse grass on the sandy ground.

The garden was a sort of oasis surrounded by a desert of dunes. As often as we could, my brother and I, sometimes accompanied by some nephews and nieces, would escape the garden via a narrow path through thorny bushes to go and explore the dunes. I remember the dunes as gigantic. But that was probably because we were so small. We would climb on them and run and jump off them and make quite some excursions. Occasionally entering one of the many abandoned World War 2 bunkers, where it was always cool and dark.

We often went to the sea as well. Either for long walks along the water, for afternoons of picnicking and sun bathing, or for digging canals, making sand castles, kiting or fishing shrimp with nets we pushed forward by hand in the puddles left by a retreating sea.

As I grew older, my interest in leisurely sun bathing among hundreds of other tourists faded in favor of walks along the shore when the weather was not attractive to tourists. I loved the wind and the rain, the huge clouds and the general sense of desolation. Later, when I had my own car, I would drive to the north of France off season, to find the abandoned tourist villages that dot the coast. In Belgium, the dyke along the waterfront has been fortified so to speak by ugly 1960s-style flat buildings for budget tourism, often replacing the dunes altogether. But in France, one can still get a taste of the luxurious Belle Epoque, when coastal tourism started.