So there were more words.... Damn!

Jim Dixon, how dare you... handkerchiefs and rolled up trousers - that was no parody... that was for real!!!! And a frightening experience it was too. I remember being taken to Blackpool, the jewel of the north-country riviera, in the fifties and being quite frankly astonished.

There they were, massed ranks of otherwise respectable citizens, some in the fair-isle jumper beloved of the Monty Python crew, but some in suits and waistcoats with their trousers rolled up, standing at the shore-line while the water splashes around their ankles. Women tended to be more decorous of course, staying demurely in the background, guarding the offspring trying to dig their way to China or gnawing sticks of rock with loopkcalB written through it. Mind you, some of the more daring of the ladies would take off their stockings and also stand in the water. Gad, the sheer effrontery.

Back home in puritan-ridden Scotland, I would never have dreamed that such scenes of wicked debauchery and riotous behaviour could have been permitted in public... and on the Sabbath day forbye.

No, we children of the northern lands would be taken to our local sea-side spot on occasional Saturdays in the bathing season and dressed in knitted wool dark blue swimming trunks which, when wet, absorbed at least three gallons of water and then threatened to fall with a "splush" around your ankles as you walked out of the water. All this before the critical eye of every other child for twenty miles around. Oh, and if this garment stayed up, by the time you got back to shore, the waterlogged mass of fabric had drooped to the point that the crotch was roughly between the knees, and when you sat down, the sound and sensation was pretty well indescribable. And the worst of it was.... you were expected to enjoy the whole experience!

From scenes like these, mighty Scotia's grandeur springs.... and they also explain why I hated the sea-side then and now, even though I live in a part of the world claimed to have some of the best beaches in the world.

PS - Dixon eh? You're not related to Reginald of the mighty Wurlitzer and the Blackpool Pier then? Because if you are, rest assured that you'll be found out and hunted down one of these days.....