As an American by birth and upbringing, I worked out long ago that although I may live in Britain long enough to earn a British passport -- even long enough quite frankly to be thrilled by a public sighting of someone 'famous' like Ann Widdecombe -- I will never be truly British thanks to one cold fact: I did not grow up enduring wind breakers and flasks of hot tea at the seaside.
What I hadn't appreciated was the extent of the missing bodily machismo that separates me from my ancestral countrymen.
A start-of-summer, bank holiday Sunday spent wandering around the center of Bournemouth, on England's south coast, found me wishing I'd brought an extra layer to pull over my hooded sweatshirt. Meanwhile, practically every male in sight sported board shorts, tank tops and flip flops; the females wore even less.
At the beachfront, I wrapped my arms around myself to block out the chill and watched in marvel as hundreds of true Brits built sandcastles, lay in their skivvies reading books, tossed balls lackadaisically into half-buried buckets, and yes, swam in the scale-gray surf (I shudder to think of the water temperature).
The beach at Bournemouth on Sunday. Sensible people
kept their coats and hats on.
One plump and particularly pale man in Speedos lay with his arms and legs splayed, as if to catch the sun in all his crevices. Which would have been perfectly natural, except that there was... no... sun!
If only The Truman Show wasn't such a far-fetched concept these incredible displays of manufactured warmth and unlikely jollity would be much more easily put out of the mind with a shake of the head and a nod to Big Brother.
