2023-08-14 06:15:16
My footprints in the sand: I lie around on the edge of Portugal and pay homage to the great horizontal, intoxicated by the sea. The senses are flooded, the tide is pleasant in the brain. It’s just enough to think about how often you actually have to listen to Howie Carpendale’s numinous seventies lard aria until the cerebral sand trickles out of your ears.
And would this sand then also become a beach? How many fantastic billions of these tiny grains do you actually need for a fully usable, wave-washed holiday sand carpet? Or are actually pebble beaches much nicer? Perhaps true beach fun doesn’t include a Howie or a sand carpet, just a sunbathing area? In addition, of course, also a fine breeze and surf. Everything else is just shore.
Every beach has its own wonders. Portugal’s beaches are windswept, soft and often bizarrely beautiful beyond. Italy’s beaches are boarded with deckchairs and cost as much as an hour’s parking in New York. The Côte d’Azur has the most persistent beach traders, Oregon has none, Rio has as many as all of France combined, and the beach at Punta del Este in Uruguay is windier than all of Portugal combined. But he doesn’t have any bizarre beauty to offer, but looks charmingly scrapped, a bit like Howard Carpendale.
Long gone: Angela Merkel’s trail (left) next to that of Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski (barefoot), in the sand of the Baltic Sea, in the summer of 2011. : Image: AFP
Its sadly immortal “tracks in the sand” will soon be fifty years old. ZDF will almost certainly put together a colorful special show with Florian Fischer and Helene Silbereisen, who then sing, laugh and clap at prime time until even poor Howie has cerebral sand trickling out of his pear. Doesn’t the man have friends to save him? After all, Robinson met his best and for a long time only friend Freitag on the beach – after discovering his footprints in the sand and thus learning of its existence.
“And a Life in Danger”
Woe is me, I must turn! The position of the sun changes here on the Portuguese beach. Fortunately, Howie’s song falls to me and another one comes back to me: “Hot sand and a lost country / And a life in danger” Mina sang in 1962 with this incredibly elegiac voice that still makes every shovel of sand glow. “Hot sand and the memory of it / That it was nicer once.”
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The dividing line between land and sea was long considered unbridgeable. Until the fish came, the first beach guests in the history of the planet, and set out to conquer new territory. The beginning of all fresh-air life, still without a beach bar and lounger service that was constantly filled with music. Since then, the flushed edge of the sea has been raising new questions: Can sand carpets also be beaten out at the weekend? Is message in a bottle delivered to the recipient without sufficient postage? Even as far as Porto or only just beyond Lisbon? And did Howie find his sandy beach love after all? Or just a lonely couch?
Questions that just trickle out of my head at the end of a good day at the beach. Until it really is low tide. I hope they don’t leave any traces. Not on land and certainly not on the beach.
#mind #lie #sand