WHEN I first moved to this stretch of North-west coastline a few years ago, I was excited to think I was once again going to live by the seaside.

was brought up in a town on the South Coast, which had a steeply sloping pebble beach with fishing boats and impressive tides, and there was a pier which stretched out over deep water where you could fish for sea bass, grey mullet and plaice.

I loved looking at the sea, especially when it is angry, with foam-flecked breakers crashing onto the shore in a stiff breeze. And when the weather is calm, there’s nothing like a refreshing swim in salt water.
Then for many years I lived in landlocked isolation from the briny delights of the seaside.

What a disappointment then, to arrive in Southport, to find the beach a dull expanse of flat grey sand, and where the sea is most days just a distant smudge on the horizon.

Great for sand yachting and kite flying, but not much else.

With all this talk of Southport as a classic resort and plans for improving the beachfront area, why is no-one thinking big about the beach itself, which surely should be a seaside resort’s best asset?
Here we have people complaining about sand extraction companies taking the stuff away, as if there isn’t enough to go round.

If I was in charge, I’d pay them to do it.

I’d want a massive mile-wide channel dredged out of the shoreline so the tide could come in and create a proper swimming beach.

I know it sounds like an implausible engineering feat, but if you can create beaches by bringing in loads of sand, like has been done in Bournemouth – and on a massive scale in Dubai – would it not be possible to get the same result here by taking sand away?

Funfairs and conference hotels are all very well, but let’s get the basics right.

If the building companies don’t want the Southport sand, perhaps it could be taken  down the coast to Formby, where apparently the dunes are receding at an alarming rate.

Perhaps I am living in Wonderland like Lewis Carroll:
The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand;
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
“If this were only cleared away,
They said, “it would be grand!”
“If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year,
Do you suppose,” the Walrus said
“That they could get it clear?
“I doubt it,” said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.
Just a thought…
m.montgomery@champnews.com

IF there’s one word  guaranteed to elicit a snort of derision from me, it’s ‘designer’.

The notion that a product suddenly acquires enormous cachet, justifying an equally enormous price premium, by prefixing it with ‘designer’ seems an outrageous stretch of credulity.

As the father of  three boys, one just entered into his teenage years, I know all about peer pressure and street cred.

I have had to endure those rows in shops when all efforts to steer, cajole, threaten and bribe youngsters into accepting a sturdily functional and reasonably priced item of clothing or footwear are met with sulky stubborn insistence on the latest blinged-up, overpriced product hyped by celebrity endorsement and/or TV advertising.

“No, Dad, it’s not that they cost £90 or that Ronaldo wears them, they really are much better that those £25 football boots you made me try on.”

Yeah, right.

For teenage boys (and probably girls, too), it’s all about showing off. Having the most expensive or flashiest gear gives you some sort of status among your mates, not least, I suppose, the inference that you have your parents well and truly cowed into submission.

But they’ll grow out of it soon enough, when they have to pay for stuff themselves, won’t they?

I used to think so, but I’m not so sure any more.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that in this ever more homogenous and over-regulated society, the more people are forced to conform, the more they seek the cult of individuality, and never mind the cost.

They’d rather eat rubbish food and stay in than be seen out in anything less than top bling.

Designer gear lifts them above the common herd, doesn’t it?

Well, no, actually. You still end up looking like everyone else in your peer group, but at much greater expense. And then when the common herd get on your track, you have to move on. Consider the Burberry chavs of yesteryear …

And I think the conceit of manufacturers sticking their logos and labels on the outside of their garments is just a con in the emperor’s-new-clothes mould.

A brilliant con, mind you, as we are paying them through the nose to advertise their wares for them, instead of the other way around.

MY view of hospitals has always been coloured by impressions from the media.

I think the first image I had was gleaned from Carry On films, where hospitals were staffed by pompous consul-tants, bungling and randy junior doctors, saucy nurses and everything presided over by Hattie Jacques as the formidable Matron who swept through the wards like a galleon under full sail.

Then there were all those TV medical dramas where earnest and dashing doctors juggled heroic acts of life-saving with precarious love lives, leading up to today’s Casualty stuffed with non-stop life-or-death melodrama.

In fiction, it’s all go, go, go. In reality, it’s dull, dull, dull.

Over the last week I have made regular visits to a loved one who is hospital awaiting surgery on a major injury.

And the main impression is one of isolation and being forgotten.

All those bustling nurses and cheery orderlies on the TV shows? Nowhere to be seen.

Presumably budgetary cons-traints mean staffing is kept to a bare minimum, but having to wait half an hour in intense  pain after pressing the emer-gency call button for someone to attend is surely not right.

It’s not the fault of individual nurses and other staff at the sharp end, they are genuinely conscientious, if harassed.

I suspect the problem is, like a lot of things these days, down to over-management and, ironically, ‘elf ‘n safety’.

Years ago in my home town, there was an independent voluntary organisation dedica-ted to supporting local hospital patients.

It would raise money and spend it on TV rooms, books and other niceties which made hospital stays a bit more bearable, and organise rotas to go round wards with drinks, magazines, sweets, toiletries  and so on or just chat to patients and pass on messages, taking a little pressure off the  overworked medical staff.

I know in many areas the WRVS is in operation and I’m sure it and other volunteers do good work, up to a point.

But judging by the Southport and Ormskirk Hospital Trust’s published policy on voluntary workers, all volunteers have to be recruited and controlled by the management.

This involves filling in long application forms, providing references, attending inter-views, submitting to criminal records bureau investigations and undergoing ‘training’. No doubt this is intended to protect patients against weirdos, but I suspect it merely puts off genuine caring people who might otherwise give up their time to support the sick.

And as for providing TV rooms, well of course we now have Patientline units, which charge patients £2.90 a day for Coronation Street and Pac-Man and an outrageous premium for making or receiving telephone calls.

There’s progress for you.
m.montgomery@champnews.com