Last weekend was spent at Frinton-on-Sea visiting my mother and looking around the town. At this time of year the mile-long, sandy beach is virtually deserted apart from the odd dog-walker, the odd horse, and the odd elderly bookseller shuffling along whilst he contemplates life’s miseries. The end-to-end walk passes the best part of 700 beach-huts and, being Frinton, only a few huts have names - Barb’s Place, Yer’Tis and (inevitably) Jabba the Hutt being random examples
Odd to think that at the time of the Napoleonic Wars Frinton consisted of just a small church, the long-since-submerged Frinton Hall and a Martello tower. The tower was never garrisoned because it was reckoned to be an unhealthy place with malaria-infested marshes. The Victorians created the resort and, apart from the little old church at the bottom of Connaught Avenue the town is now all Victorian or later. Ursula Bloom the novelist lived there. Ernest Luff (he who sang the first recorded Oh, For The Wings of a Dove when a child) ran his Christian bookshop and cycled around the town. Arthur Havers was the golf club professional in my childhood (he was Open Champion in 1923 at Royal Troon), and there is a Sherlock Holmes connection. But it mainly for its conservatism that Frinton is known – the resistance to buses and pubs, no ice cream sellers on the beach, no slot machine arcades, no candy floss.
Nowadays there are two Frintons, one on each side of the railway line and its famous level crossing which operates as a sort of frontier border control. Those on the easterly (sea) side of the line are the real Frintonians but there is actually more Frinton housing and there are more Frinton residents to be found on the less-fancied side of the railway track – miles of carefully tended bungalows in roads like Freituna Way, running most of the way into neighbouring Walton-on-the-Naze. For myself I am very fond of the stylish Art Deco houses which form just a fraction of the planned Frinton Park Estate to the north of the town. Less than thirty of these houses were ever built including the famous Round House (originally the Sales and Information Office for the estate), but the original plan was for 1,100 of them.
Last words on Frinton come from the window of the Olive Luff Bookshop in
As she remained long at prayer before the LORD, Eli watched her mouth,
for Hannah was praying silently; though her lips were moving, her voice could not be heard. Eli, thinking her drunk, said to her, "How long will you make a drunken show of yourself? Sober up from your wine!"
“It isn't that, my lord," Hannah answered. "I am an unhappy woman. I have had neither wine nor liquor; I was only pouring out my troubles to the LORD.”
And this reminds me to give news of my diet. Like Hannah I have had neither wine nor liquor, nor have I had bread or potatoes for more than two weeks. After my last report of a half-stone loss things have quietened down a bit. At my last visit to the scales I weighed in at 16 stone, 10 pounds. A long way to go, still.
