A party of four from Hamburg carried a folding table, four chairs, a tablecloth and a hamper down to the beach on Sunday evening and ate a four-course dinner on the sand.
They arrived at approximately half past six and left a little after nine. The candles were in jars, which several observers noted was sensible given the wind.
The initial reaction
Opinion, on Sunday evening, was divided.
One view held that it was a bit much. A second view held that they were doing no harm to anybody and had brought their own chairs. A third view, expressed at the shop on Monday morning, was that it was showing off.
“I watched them from the top for a while. They had a cloth on the table. On a beach. In this wind. And it stayed on.”
A resident
The revised reaction
By Tuesday the position had shifted, for two reasons.
The first is that they took everything away with them, including the wax, and the beach was cleaner afterwards than it had been before, which is not something that can be said of most Sundays in August.
The second is that it looked, by all accounts, lovely.
The consensus at the shop is now that it was a nice thing to have done, that we live in a beautiful place and hardly ever sit in it, and that there is no reason a person could not put a table on that beach if they wanted to.
Mrs Hendry has said she may try it. Two others have said they would come.
