hodgkinson

By all means choose the Sea.

In the ancient world, being exiled to a seaside town was considered a fate almost worse than death. If you muttered to an enemy, ‘I hope you like the taste of seafood,’ that meant you were threatening them with banishment to a distant shore.

In 8 AD, poor Ovid was exiled by Augustus to Tomis on the Black Sea, now a seaside resort called Constanta, in Romania.

Today’s tourists might welcome a visit to sunny Tomis. But for Ovid it was not pleasant. One of the worst things about it was that nobody there realised how important he was. ‘Here I’m the barbarian, understood by nobody,’ he wailed.

Delacroix and Turner both pictured Ovid standing on the shore of the Black Sea, looking really miserable. They were doubtless inspired by these cheery, Eliot-like sentiments from his exile poems:

The face of the land is covered with neither shrubs nor trees, and that lifeless winter merges into winter.

Here a fourth winter wearies me, contending as I am with cold, with arrows, and with my own fate.

This year, it’s a summer in the city for Mrs Mouse and me.

No foreign holidays. No fretting about suitcases being overweight. No early starts. No shuffling through Stansted Airport like condemned pigs.

No shovelling out untold piles of cash on swordfish steaks, questionable pizzas and strange beer. No lining up outside the Uffizi. No embarrassed pointing at things in charming delis as the only Italian I know is ‘Due birre, per favore.’ No boredom on beaches.

There’s a clue in the name. The word ‘travel’ is derived from the Latin trepalium, meaning ‘a three-pronged instrument of torture’. In French, travail means pain, suffering or work.

Instead we’ll be holidaying at home, in Shepherd’s Bush. It’ll be great. We’re near the Thames. We’ll visit Hyde Park and Soho and I’ll play tennis in Holland Park.

We’ve got Kew Gardens and Richmond Park. So many lovely parks. On my bicycle, I can find beauty everywhere. And we can easily get to the M40 or the M4 if we feel like getting out of town.

It was an enormous relief to make this decision – a moment of liberation. A lightness entered my soul. I felt free as a bird.

American poet Billy Collins experienced the same surge of delight when his holiday to Italy was cancelled. In his 1991 poem Consolation, he writes: How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer, wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns.

He thought it was a treat to spend the summer in his own neighbourhood: How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets, fully grasping the meaning of every roadsign and billboard and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.

We’ll be avoiding seaside towns in Blighty as well. I used to think I liked the sea, but lately I’m not so sure. It was while at the seaside that T S Eliot wrote a particularly depressing section of his melancholic poem The Waste Land: ‘On Margate Sands./ I can connect/ Nothing with nothing’.

Lewis Carroll was no believer in the hype, either. In his 1909 poem A Sea Dirge, he complained about the contemporary mania for rushing to the seaside:

If you like your coffee with sand for dregs,

A decided hint of salt in your tea, And a fishy taste in the very eggs –

My tears are endless, unless numbness checks them: and a lethargy like death grips my thoughts.

We’ve only very recently decided to start liking the sea as a place for holidays. In a short essay on exile, Jan Morris says a British officer in 1830 whinged in a letter home about his posting. ‘Oh, what have I done,’ he groaned, ‘what have I done, that Her Majesty should banish me to this vile and abominable place?’ The abominable place in question? The Greek isle of Corfu.

Paradise is not the same as home. Last year, we spent four weeks on a lovely island in Croatia. Sun, sea, medieval architecture. But halfway through week three, I started to long to be back in London.

Matthew Arnold was another seahater. To him, it brought to mind ‘the turbid ebb and flow of human misery’. It was the sound of the sea, for Arnold, writing in 1867, that was really depressing:

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.

So please enjoy your trip to the seaside, whether foreign or domestic. I’ll be thinking of you when walking round my neighbourhood, free of care and worry, basking in the joy of the familiar.