Scarborough

Spent a weekend with a mate in a suburb of Scarborough. Or, if you are an estate agent, on the edge of the North York Moors. Whatever, he has just moved in to a Victorian House with a river to the front, really rather picturesque. And a house which has to serve as bachelor pad and office most of the time, but turn into family home when he has the kids. Such is the life of a single dad. And this weekend he had the kids as well as me.

Now I should start this entry by saying, never underestimate the theological astuteness of small children. When given the choice of spending an hour of organised religion with his dad and sister (ie attend a Harvest Festival) or staying with a strange man he had never (to his knowledge) met before (ie me), the 4 year old picked the strange man option. Well to be fair, maybe the Tom & Jerry dvd won him over. Anyway, I stayed in Friday night with him while dad and daughter did their bit at the local church. And to be fair even the 7 year old afterwards asked if next time she could take her ear-plugs so she didn't have to listen to all the prayers.

Lets face it, all those religious things for the kids aren't for the kids at all. They are for the adults, to make them feel better. Ah, I hear you say, at least they are learning good christian morality. Really? I have never bought this theory of morality and religion being intertwined. Let us take a simple moral dilemma. Lets say one found a work colleague was abusing children. Do you (a) report him to the police or (b) swear the children to secrecy? I think it likely that 99.99% of the general public, regardless of upbringing, would pick (a) quite easily. Only catholic clergy could find (b) the right answer. So overall, on strict moral grounds, I would pick the Tom & Jerry cartoons. After all, the lazy crafty cat always gets his comeuppance and the good guy mouse wins in the end. And by the way, there is no maximum number of times you can watch a heavy weight fall on Tom before it stops being funny. Trust me, I watched enough Tom & Jerry cartoons over the weekend to prove the point. I do these experiments so you don't have to. Selfless or what?

Saturday we ventured into Scarborough itself. I always find it a rather sad place. Fading grandeur can convert into shabby chic. In Scarborough it has converted into tackiness with a number of jarring reminders of what it once was. This is most evident in the strikingly fine hotels and guest houses (from the outside at least) contrasting with the fish & chip shops and "kiss-me-quick hat" souvenir shops. It has, alas, gone very down market.

We went to the Rotunda Museum, opened in 1829. And it could be very attractive as an old style museum, ie its beauty is in the building itself and its eclectic Victorian artifacts. But it has been modernised and now has some interactive stuff for kids, mostly based on local geology. But its very small for that, and the budget wouldn't stretch to anything very exciting. So really it has lost a lot of its Victorian charm, without replacing it with the impressive modern wizardry the 4 and 7 year olds of today demand.

We went on to the Art Gallery too, which although small is rather more enticing to the discerning visitor (ie me). Obviously you are not going to find Picassos and Monets in a provincial gallery, but lots of nice local landscapes, including numerous wonderful landscape photographs.

Surprisingly, it seems Scarborough has become a destination for the surfing fraternity. While I can just about see the attraction in California or Hawaii, or at a pinch Cornwall, why anyone would want to freeze their balls off in the North Sea just defeats me. But each to their own.

Sunday we tried a more obviously child-friendly option, Eden Camp. Ok, an unlikely visitor attraction, being a British Prisoner of War camp. But the huts have been converted into a whole series of little museums featuring different aspects of World War II, including a mock up of a prisoner of war hut. Another consists largely of newspapers of the day. A headline about the Iraq War from 1942 rather brings home how little the world has changed, while the exhibition on rationing rather shows how different things are now.

The canteen ("Officers Mess") for lunch did try to take the war theme too far, from the themed food ("Home Guard Cornish pasties" and "Doodlebug fish fingers") to the cheery war time music. How we ever won the war when those singalong ditties were supposed to keep up morale I do not know. Frankly one more loop of wartime songs playing over lunch and I would have been ready to surrender to the Germans. Even a life in lederhosen would have been preferable to Gracie Fields.