Summer’s here, so what to do? I know. Let’s join the gridlocked throngs in thongs on their way to a dystopian hell. Let’s bury our common sense in the sand and top up our skin cancer. Let’s pretend the beach is fun, fun, fun and not agony dressed up as dressing down.

I live in Bournemouth, but still don’t get the beach. It is the nation’s catheter bag, largely life-enhancing but no fun when full. You can look at it as a celebration of human diversity or, as I prefer, a place where Big Brother contestants go to die.

I should clarify my position. I love the beach in all seasons except when it is despoiled by human detritus. Why do you come? Why spend your life yearning for a bigger house and garden, dreaming of escaping the rat race, and then sit on a plot of sand more densely populated than your average tenement? It’s like the Tube but with hairy backs.

Why turn red next to tattooed BNP types and teens on Red Stripe? Why be middle aged and think that you can wear Speedos? Or worse; Bournemouth and Brighton have nudist beaches, which are either libertarian idylls or refuges for dirty old men and touring German swingers (depending on whether you have your pants on).

A fellow Dorset resident, Billy Bragg, recently sang: “The beach is free”, but in truth it costs an arm and a leg. That is if you can find anywhere to park and be bothered to join one of the interminable queues for calories in a cone. Now there is an added cost. The Marine Conservation Society revealed recently that 78 British beaches failed to reach the European Commission’s mandatory standard for water quality. For the first time since 2002 the number of recommended beaches has fallen below 50 per cent. This is partly down to the lack of respect that means our beaches are routinely polluted with rubbish.

Nobody cares, and I am impatiently awaiting a turn in the weather. Why? Because the beach is still the best place to stay home and sample the worst of Englishness abroad — the stag parties, the syringes, the gurners sweating eau de chav. It would be nice to think people crowded together because they crave a lost sense of community, but I suspect it is a lack of imagination and a desire to be orange that does it. Yes, I love the romance of the beach, but the summer version is as close to an open prison as most of us will get.

So if you head to the beach every time there is a hay fever-fuelled sniff of a heat wave, think again and turn back. Avoid the traffic jams, soreness and rage that will come from being thrust into other people’s lives. Come back in October.

There’s nothing for you here.

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