Litterolly on the edge of barbarity.

For forty years at 52 West 8th Street, Greenwich Village, Electric Lady Studios has been the hired host for a host of the great and good of popular music. A dream realised for Jimi Hendrix as an ambiance conducive for his creativity, sadly only experienced for four weeks before the official opening celebrations in august 1970. Three weeks after the party he was famously dead in London; undone and immortalised by his amazing talent.

Among the first artists to record there was another exceptional guitarist, Elliot Randall, who recorded a song that was never going to be played at the RSPCA dinner dance, Take Out The Dog and Bark the Cat, which is great in a way and here in the top corner. The only reason for this historical snippette is that Electric Lady Studios used and still do use Neve world-leading recording and mixing equipment from the Oscar winning Burnley company. It was on Neve technology again, twelve years prior to the studio on Montserrat being buried in volcanic ash in 1995, that The Police recorded their album Synchronicity, and it was on Jungian synchronicity and possible uncausality that I thought to type a few ill-chosen words but couldn’t think how to start. As you can see a start of a sort has been attempted but I've thought of something else, and not necessarily better, to maunder away over. So fortunately to avoid starting again, it just happens that at some point Lou Reed recorded at Electric Lady Studios; a man whose song about doomed youth (maybe) and needles, appropriately with some synchronicity, made over two million pounds for children in need.

Even what should be a perfect day can be marred, perhaps by a thoughtless remark, or the absence of a thoughtful one, possibly even by an ill-judged smile taken to be the worst type of smirky look and definitely by the same category of laugh. All this after you’ve managed to have pleasant weather, at least moving traffic and possibly edible food. But sometimes that really hard pip in the Satsuma comes from the least expected segment. A perfect day at the seaside with perfect Sarah promised to be so carefree, euphoric and filled with sun-drenched laughter, and it very nearly lived up to all those expectations. You may remember, because I keep bringing it up, she gave me up for Brussels, but this was before that cross-channel trauma. This was summer; our only summer.

Unbroken sunshine with light wispy high clouds (cirri in geographical terminology) and a gentle off-shore breeze covers the weather at the time, a small red bikini just covered Sarah and, if I remember correctly, I was covered by Norwich Union and sand flies. Ding-ding-de-ding-dong: we queued with the all the children for two 99s. For ill-mannered reasons known only to himself, Mr Whippy manhandled mine first, in the usual way with a sarcastically sullen dollop of ice-cream and then a haphazardly poked stick of chocolate in the top. I wasn't particularly surprised by this primitivism but when he carefully placed Sarah’s Flake at an unmistakably suggestive angle and gave it a gentle little twist with his thumb and forefinger just to make sure it was settled before handing it to her with a grin; I literally couldn’t believe what I was seeing. A few years ago, and really not that many years, my riding glove would have been out of the back pocket of my shorts and round his leering face quicker than he had time to say, “There you go darling."
 
For some while after, I mulled over whether I should actually challenge him to some sort of combat, demand satisfaction in the way of, "Outside Whippy, now!", or more politely, "Outside Whippy, at dawn!", but on reflection, what would it have looked like to Sarah, resorting to vendor violence at a resort, over an obscene ice-cream? Not good, she was such a gentle thing when she was awake, and I’ve always been non-confrontational and placatory. This is not a particularly worthwhile evolutionary mechanism, survival of the calmest doesn’t have the same ring of alpha-male confidence, but the guiding precepts of a civilised society can’t be for everywhere except the beach, a place where I think they should be more strictly adhered to if anything. It can, after all, be a place of near-naked vulnerability.
 
I have spent far too many weeks with sand in my crevices for the benefit of people who wouldn’t notice if I crept away and returned every couple of hours to apply more unction to places they couldn’t reach. I’ve looked at so many horizons, at so many boats and ships moving so painfully slowly across them, wished for so many kids to conceal large sharp rocks in their sand castles before leaving them for passing corpulently loud middle-aged Teutonic men to later take manly flip-flopped kicks at in front of their own kleine kinder. I’ve been on empty beaches where people have settled themselves so close by that I’ve caught their gaze of, “You don’t mind do you? It’s not your beach and anyway it’s safer if we huddle together when we’re in large open spaces”. I’ve been on crowded beaches where the odour and hum of humanity hovers like a shimmering pall just above the carpet of prone sizzling pinkness, punctuated by the occasional joyful squeal and splash of holiday hand on holiday buttock. Other places where, probably driven by their neighbouring cacklers, everyone prolapses into the mind-set of a flock of spiky nesting seabirds, most noticeably on Corsica, or it might actually have been Cromer.
 
I have only ever once expressed a desire to go to a meeting of sand and sandal and that was when I made a long detour, to everyone’s utter disbelief and horror, from the ordained migratory route south to visit St Marc-on-sea where Mr Hulot’s Holiday was filmed in the early 1950s. Surprisingly and disappointingly the village had changed. The hotel was still there but modernised, the tennis courts had gone and I couldn’t find the graveyard or the guesthouse where athletic plaited Nathalie Pascaud stayed and spent most of her holiday voyeuristically watching Hulot from her second-floor conservatory. In an effort to take their minds off what was a becoming a slightly disturbing day of enigmatic searches, they hadn’t seen the film, I tried to explain to the young Stimps the difference between coast and shore as in seaward boundary of land and vice versa. Younger Stimp pointed out that the tides are variable at different times of the year so where is this old person’s so-called boundary, fortunately we had brought a so-called beach ball so I was able to give it a sturdy boot and shout, as any confronted father would, “Last one to the ball doesn’t know anything about geographical terminology.” It turned out that I was the ill-informed and hyperventilating laggard. I'd kicked the ball up the slope of the beach, by half-distance I was ignominiously like George Stevens in The Hill. How we all laughed the next day when I’d recovered just enough to faintly utter another simile and another film they hadn’t seen.

Back at the jewel of England’s Eastern Riviera, not in the least exotic but charged with more seething glaucous undercurrents of passionate and erotic confusion, misunderstanding and doubt than any blanched Caribbean shore (or coast) basking gentle and mugging under an azuline sky.

I couldn’t bring myself to eat that 99. I discreetly let it slip silently from it’s soggy cone. If I was at all artistic, called Ingmar Stimp and this was Summer With Sarah, right there would be the metaphor for our relationship disappearing into the sand, with both of us just silently and passively watching it slowly melt away to nothing.

“He’s still there, go and get another one, you like 99s.”

“No, I don’t think I will, I used to like them, but not any longer." I sighed, “No, not any longer Sarah.”

"You are silly, I love them...loads. I could eat three."

"Could you though, could you really?"

"I'm insatiable. Look at that perfect sky."

"Yes, it's perfect."

"Umm."

She had kindly saved it all up for an unintentional iconic big Flake finale.

Languidly, stretched recumbent on the sand with closed eyes, a vision of tanned epicurean drowsiness and glistening sensual abandonment. I might have been patently the crumbliest flakiest of the two of us but I didn't care, I had to look away; only to be confronted by another hazy and blurred horizon harbouring one or two clouds I couldn't possibly have noticed at the time. I was preoccupied with pondering over how almost relieved I'd be if I turned around to find Sarah gurgling with gluttonous satisfaction and her lovely face completely veiled with smeared moist chocolate fingerprints and tiny brown bubbles inflating and popping wetly at the corners of her smacking lips. But I knew that would never happen, it couldn't, she was insatiable and perfect, so I probably continued staring out to sea and probably to the southeast and towards that country probably famous for producing just one thing. Well, maybe two: chocolate and the bitter taste of rejection.