Always Restless, Always Longing

These photographs were taken in my hometown of Bournemouth, with an M35 Kodak camera. The first photograph shows me sitting at my grandmother’s dressing table. I used to love sneaking into her bedroom and looking through her dressing table drawers at her lipsticks and foundations, eyeshadows and mascaras. My mother didn’t wear makeup, so it was always fun to play and experiment. I would open the wardrobe and see rows of shoes, and pull open the drawers to find rolls of colourful scarves. It felt like a risk to look through her private things, but later she told me she knew exactly what I was up to, and she smiled.

The two budgies stare out from their cage. When I was a child, the elderly couple who lived in the first-floor flat next door kept budgerigars. The husband, Frank, would invite me and Michael, who lived in the flat below, to come in and look at them. I can’t remember his wife’s name. She was always confined to a chair. We would stare at the birds, wondering at their colours, their smell, what they ate, and what it might be like to fly. One day Frank opened the cage and let them out. They dived and swooped around the room while he and his wife laughed, and Michael and I screamed with excitement.

When I take my children to Bournemouth every summer, they always expect it to be sunny. “Come to Bournemouth, sunny, sunny Bournemouth,” the old adverts used to say. But often it is not sunny. Often it is windy and rainy and overcast, and we make do with what is there: the playgrounds, the beach, the arcades, and the town centre, where so many of the shops are now boarded up.

Sometimes we walk along the high street in our raincoats, looking into the windows, and I see the boredom wash over them. I remember those summers, hanging around with nothing to do, waiting for something to happen.

Still, we make memories in this place. On beaches that are sometimes busy and sometimes deserted. In muddy and overgrown parks. In a town where there is sometimes nothing to do, where abandoned shops and empty restaurants stand beside the places that have somehow hung on.

Time blurs, and my children’s experiences combine with my own memories of boredom, hanging around and making fun. I think what breaks in Bournemouth have reminded me is that memories don’t come from perfect summers or endless entertainment, but from ordinary days shared with other people. And I love this place, in all its beauty, nostalgia and melancholy. Seaside towns have a hold on me, always restless, always longing.