I can’t be sure when Mrs Blunt and I first started holidaying at Frinton-on-Sea. I know, at the time, that there were no pubs at all in the place, and it was only the hotel bars that sustained us.
The Lock & Barrel didn’t open until the year 2000, and only then after stiff opposition from the locals. They like to think they’re a cut above, the people of Frinton. They describe one of their main shopping streets (Connaught Avenue) as ‘The Bond Street of East Anglia’. Hah!
This will be a difficult holiday, I imagine. I sense storm clouds looming over our marriage, and fear we may be heading for the rocks in the not too distant future. Over the last 12 months, we’ve come to realize we want different things from life: Mrs Blunt, with her new-found love of karaoke and bizarre fetish for kippers, is a changed woman. For my own part, I’m starting to wonder whether there might be more to life than Frinton.
It looks like we’ll be too late to pop down to see the stranded bottlenose whale in the nearby River Orwell. The local newspaper website has milked the story for all it’s worth, including this report filed by an eager staffer at 6.21 am this morning.
The journalist's remarkable prescience was rewarded shortly afterwards, when the website flashed up a new story (timed at 7.53 am), when the poor beast was put out of it's misery. One thing less to do while we're in Frinton, then, and a bit of a shame, as I believe it was a bit of a crowd-puller. There's nothing like watching an animal suffer to draw in the spectators, I suppose.
We'll have to content ourselves with the Frinton Summer Theatre. Alas, we’ll be too late to catch that fine murder mystery, Gaslight, which has entertained audiences for many years. It finishes tonight, to be replaced by Neil Simon’s Chapter Two, which I’m not familiar with, but which Frinton.org (the font of all Frinton wisdom) summarises thus: “Comic misunderstandings lead two to happiness!”
Time alone will tell whether a couple of weeks on the 'long clean greensward' of Frinton is capable of serving up the level of comedic misunderstanding needed to set Mrs B and I back on a path to marital happiness...
