My missing brother turned up in an ice-cream van

For the latest in his series of reflections on places and pathways, Will Gore recalls a fearful disappearance on Bournemouth beach during a childhood holiday

Red alert: the hordes at Bournemouth beach (Getty)

Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun, wrote Noel Coward in 1931. Had he been alive nine decades later he might usefully have added that most of them do so on Bournemouth beach.

The recent spectacle of up to half a million people crowded into a small portion of the south coast was certainly the kind of phenomenon for which Coward would surely have had a biting witticism at the ready – but perhaps even he might have struggled to say anything jaunty about trippers defecating in a burger box in the absence of proper facilities. Something about a quarter-pounder I suppose.

But even putting aside the bizarre inability of so many Englishmen (and women) to dispose of their litter responsibly – which demands at least a column of its own – and the extraordinary recklessness of travelling to a tourist hotspot in the midst of a pandemic, the charms of a British seaside town in summer are questionable at the best of times.