I can’t think why I didn’t write about this as a retirement blog topic before. I mean it’s such an obvious retirement topic and not a mention in over seven years. At least I don’t think so although it’s always possible I’ve done it and forgotten about it. That does seem to happen quite a bit these days. But on the assumption that I haven’t on either count, then here it is – retirement and beach huts. Like peaches and cream, Laurel and Hardy, together like a horse and carriage. You get the point.
I’m not sure whether beach huts are a peculiarly British institution, so maybe it’s just us. I don’t recall noticing any American or Irish versions on our travels but maybe they were there and they didn’t register. Maybe they weren’t important to me then. And it’s an excuse to include in this retirement blog an early Mrs Summerhouse painting of beach huts at Whitby.
You may be inclined to think that beach huts are important now because they’re the next in the line of retirement building projects. You know after dealing with the small matters of the Colorado cabin or the Derbyshire shed at the bottom of the garden or even the barn and its possible change-of-use, I need another building project.
Well don’t worry, that’s not the way of it. It’s just that a couple of days ago I stumbled across quite a long ‘article’ (see below) on my phone entitled, Walton on the Naze: ‘People are almost panic buying beach huts’.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-56901720
Walton on the Naze is a seaside town in the English county of Essex in case you didn’t know, and I confess I did not. Never heard of it in fact.
Apparently what is happening there is not untypical of what is going on in many British seaside towns. It’s the increasingly popular concept of ’tiny houses’ taken to an extreme. As one of the participants in the article put it, ‘they’re just a glorified shed’. We have several of those, although not by the sea of course. However, as they have become more popular, their proximity to the sea seems to be receding.
In fact some seaside sites resemble a, not very glorified, estate for sheds. The ‘best’ ones on the first row and so on back several rows until any view of the sea is blocked or at least impinged on by the view of the roofs of the first few rows. And, as a person who would rather poke himself in the eye with a portable TV aerial than stay on a caravan site (our Scottish 70th birthday celebration excepted), with all their regimented proximity, the attraction of several rows of sheds between me and the sea, is not altogether desirable.
Well I may sniff, except that these ‘sheds’ are now selling for staggering sums – £30, 40,000 and still going up. That’s some shed. True, they’re by the sea and that has always held an attraction for me. I’m a water sign after all if you subscribe to such explanations for human behaviour.
And I do have to say that, as a fairly unrelaxed kind of person, I am at my most relaxed by water and the sea would be my number one choice. That’s providing there are no other people on the beach of course. When the children were young and we’d rock up to some beach which had another family about half a mile away the kids would say, oh, oh, dad won’t like this one, there are people half a mile away. Get all the stuff back in the car and on we’d drive. So neighbourly beach huts (they couldn’t be closer) probably not.
The closest I’ve been to actually buying a property over-looking the sea would be when I worked in Scarborough and, for a short while, I thought about buying an apartment there. But common-sense prevailed. I think we already had 4 houses at that point. So no.
The house we stay in when we holiday in Ireland has a beautiful view of the sea and the Blasket Islands but that’s just for two weeks a year and we didn’t go last year and probably won’t this year either. So this doesn’t really count. But there is no doubt that the sea holds an allure as they say. Not, however, in the form of a beach hut.
When people are interviewed about the attraction for them of owning a beach hut (most of which one cannot sleep over-night in and they don’t have a toilet so maybe not so great for those of us with elderly leanings) they often say oh, its’ been in the family for years, we couldn’t possibly sell it. It’s a legacy for our children. You might think that after what I wrote recently about the increasing importance to me of leaving a legacy, that this angle would send me off into this highly competitive market trying to buy a small shed for 10’s of thousands of pounds.
I did enjoy the article and many of the photos that went with it were delightful, but not for me. To which Mrs Summerhouse breathes a sigh of relief. True I still search in my retirement for that ‘missing link’. True I have become a somewhat more the grass is greener type of guy in my retirement years, as these retirement blogs surely indicate. But on the other side of this fence is just another hut and I don’t need that. Although one last thought, you could make the argument that they’re great investment? But no, just move on.