Happy Eid

Southend Beach, 6pm. It’s grey but warm and muggy. Families in beautiful dresses sway along the beach and the promenade, seemingly worn out from celebration. Groups of young men congregate on the sea wall, grinning and japing. We’re sitting on the wall too, eating ice lollies and chucking balls up and down the promenade for the dogs, trying to time it so we don’t irritate pedestrians. We succeed, most of the time. A group of pale-faced kids and their pale-faced mothers smile and chatter in a language I don’t recognise about the dogs. “Twins” the little boy giggles, as he points and laughs. “Twins.”

A short, stocky man with an offensive baseball cap walks towards us, shouting into his phone, arranging something that sounds dodgy, even at 50 metres’ distance. His rake-thin girlfriend follows behind, dragged along by two tiny Boston terriers, appealingly mottled, with crystal-studded pink harnesses. Behind them strolls a low, muscly, beast of a dog with the presence of Pacino. “Paco!” bellows the man, urging the beast to hurry up. The beast does not hurry up. He makes his own sweet time. As he passes, I see that his eyes are soulless, dead, the colour of washed sea glass. His testicles have a presence all of their own. Paco.

Behind us, a Jewish father marshalls his family onto the beach and manfully tries to open the complex-looking portable picnic table and chairs he has lugged along with him. After five minutes of puffing and panting, he succeeds, and the family produces a mountain of food from a tiny bag and assembles themselves to eat. The kids sit peacefully around the table and gaze out at the sea, shovelling crisps into their mouths. The man stands, even though there is a chair. They don’t smile, but they seem happy. Further down the beach, older Jewish girls in long black beach dresses soak themselves in the artificial pool and laugh while their mothers sit and serve up soft drinks in plastic cups, gazing anxiously down the beach. I turn away, conscious that I’m staring. My step-daughter is trying some new move with her roller skates and filming it on her phone to share with her friends. She kicks out one leg and slowly lowers into a pistol squat, before crashing backwards onto her arse. She does this twenty or thirty times, giggling more and more each time.

After what seems like an appropriate amount of time for sitting on the wall watching the world and Paco’s testicles go by, we pick ourselves up and amble home along the prom. As we pass the open area of grass beyond the bowling green, we overtake Paco’s family, Paco, and Paco’s testicles again. This time Paco’s owner is bellowing into his phone about how dirty someone else’s dog’s arse is. The path is filled with ambling Muslims and a bunch of drunk locals, clutching plastic containers of booze, playing music on their phones and embracing each other in a way which would have seemed inappropriate until the news about Dominic Cummings ignoring the lockdown rules broke. No one here gives a shit about that though.

As we are trying to navigate this hot mess, a bicycle approaches, steered by one stoned man while an even more stoned man lounges on the back, blasting George Michael from his phone. As the bike passes, its captain performs a tricky manoeuvre, turning the bike sharply on the narrow prom and executing what would have been a perfect U-turn if he hadn’t cocked it up at the last second and tipped them both over onto the pavement. “I’m never gonna dance again; guilty feet have got no rhythm” croons George, as the men spill onto the ground, pissing themselves with laughter.

Meanwhile an over-enthusiastic Doberman has stolen our girl dog’s ball, and is goading her, jumping up and down just out of her reach with the ball in its jaws. Whipped into a frenzy of excitement, the two of them begin to hare around in wider and wider circles, finally careening onto the beach (where they are not permitted to be) and rolling around in the sand. Eventually, they return, our dog having somehow won her ball back. Elated, she decides to take advantage of the confused situation: drunk and stoned people, mess, cyclists, roller skates, and crashes into a group of picnickers, launching herself head first into the biggest bag she can find, hoping there will be food in it. I’m too busy laughing to be of any use, so my husband intervenes, forcibly wrenching her out of the bag, empty jawed, and apologises profusely. The drunk people mercifully do not give a shit, and even politely return her abandoned ball, before they continue drinking and laughing. We head home, smiling. Happy Eid!