An earlier Weston-super-nightmare?

The recent well-publicised blaze on the Grand Pier brought Weston-super-Mare sharply into the media spotlight for arguably the first and last time ever.  With it, I was reminded of an event that almost placed the same sleepy seaside town in the public consciousness way back in 1975.

Mum and GM took my brothers and I to the seaside!  We arrived at sunny Weston-s-M sometime mid-morning, and my siblings and I, each armed with a plastic spade, proceeded to dig in the sand.  “Not an unusual event to take place on a beach”, you might be tempted to say.  Read on…

We obviously had a plan – for us, this was obviously no ordinary trip to the seaside.  Where some kids might have got distracted, bored, or simply tired, we three intrepid adventurers single-mindedly continued to dig the same single hole throughout the day.  As a feat of endurance, it could probably only be matched by a trans-Atlantic swim, or a jog to Mongolia and back.  And as if the task itself wasn’t difficult enough, we had to contend with the piles of donkey do-do that littered the beach.

Come 5 o’clock, when it became time to leave, we stood back and looked at what we had created…

…a hole that would have had Tony Robinson and the Time Team green with envy.  Honestly, WW1 bomb craters would have been dwarfed by the sheer size of the excavation.  I’ve got to say I have a memory of Mum saying something like “Do you think you boys should fill it in?”, to which the answer would have been something like “But Mum, it took us the whole day to dig it, and it’s already getting dark…”

So there we have it.  We drove off and left this enormous hole in the sand, just asking to have a car, or worse still, a donkey, fall into it and never be seen again.

Where Weston-super-nightmares-happen…