I'm a few weeks late posting this picture, we of course took it on the 28th July, the day our seaside pier went up in flames. We said goodbye to Jason who was heading off to work early on the boys first day of the summer holiday. We had an emotional phone call from him 15 minutes later to say he had cycled into town but instead of going to work thick smoke had drawn him to the seafront. He stood and watched as flames engulfed our pier. He told us to look outside, as we would probably see the smoke. The boys immediately ran out in their pajamas to find a huge column of thick grey smoke billowing into the sky. They couldn't wait to see it up close, so we switched on the news to see if they had started reporting it. We weren't very impressed with the coverage, we knew about it before BBC news did, so we decided to head down to the beach ourselves to take a look.
It took us a while to get into town, obviously everyone else had the same idea, and the roads were at a standstill. We finally managed to detour to the chapel car park where we could park and walk down to the beach. The boys were fascinated by what was happening and took their camera to record the event. It was an incredibly sad sight. We stood around with hundreds of others watching and smoke rise and molten metal fall from the biggest landmark of our town.
The boys were a little sad, we reminisced about times we had gone of walks and eaten ice-creams and chips on the pier. We remembered visiting it with great-Grandpa, Grandpa and Grannie. Grannie especially loved a nice bag of chips. The boys also speculated as to the causes of the fire, and decided between them that it had been caused by an exploding bomb filled chicken or turkey cooked in one of the chip fryers. They were fascinated and actually more excited about the whole situation than sad. I had to remind them a couple of times to be respectful of others who may be feeling very sad. I do think that it was a very typical reaction for a 5 & 8 year old, and wasn't upset with them, just thought it was a marvelous teaching opportunity. It's not often that you get to experience first hand a major national news event first hand.
Two weeks on and we're still not sure of the actual cause of the fire. We hope that the structure hasn't been damaged so significantly that the pier won't be re-built. It'll take a while of course. There's still plenty to do in town and the surrounding area, and we've spent some time down on the seafront as a family to support our town. We now have two piers that need renovation and an outdoor swimming pool, we're hoping that this event will kickstart a huge renovation project for our traditional seaside town.
