The Beach Is For The Birds

Department of Wit.

- P. J. O’Rourke

WILL SOMEONE PLEASE explain the beach to me? What if you’d never seen or heard of a beach and someone suggested you spend your holiday at a place where there’s a large, hot, windy expanse of ground-up stones, bordered by freezing water in such a state of agitation that going near it is like being targeted by Russian police water cannons at an anti-Putin demonstration, except the water has things in it that eat you? A place where your children will be fried until they blister, burst and peel like hot dogs left too long on the grill? Would you go there? You would, I discovered, if your wife and kids insisted. So we rented a cottage on the beach.