Southend; proper name: Souf-end

Southend on Sea is the more popular, more well-known sister to my own tiny Leigh-on-Sea. She is no London, to be sure; she isn't even a Birmingham. But as a child, she was the exciting city just around the corner; one with a theme park (however ramshackle) and a pier (however windswept). So on Boxing Day, we decided to take our post-dinner stroll there, only a short car-ride away.


And Southend, too, has changed. The waterfront, especially, looks different; it is cleaner, sleeker, and of course, a much nicer place for money to exchange hands. It doesn't really bother me, I suppose. Just past this spaceshippy pier front entrance, there are the same familiar, grungy streets full of shoddy arcades, fluorescent chip shops, and poorly carpeted trinket shops.

How I have missed ye, Adventure Island!

Farewell, Southend. I hope I'll see you again sometime; I feel that our visit was incomplete. We were foiled in our attempts to walk along your pier, which turned out to be closed at dusk. We could only stare nostalgically at the Adventure Island sign. Most of the shops on High Street were already closed. Things in England don't stay open past the setting of the sun, which, here, usually comes at around 4 in the afternoon.

But I already have you preserved in my mind, perfectly- your freshly fried doughnuts at the end of the pier, dusted in sugar; the open square above the Odeon cinema where we could chase pigeons; and your beautifully tacky, colorful theme park where we would be set free for an afternoon, until dusk fell and everything would close, exactly on time.

Home Sweet Home: in which I return to the abode of my childhood

At the tender age of 11, almost a decade ago now (pardon my involuntary shudder; it is still shocking to me that my life can now be separated into decades) this was my home. As a family, we willingly transplanted ourselves from sunny California- the Golden State, the land of ocean and vineyards and hippies and mountains and pine- to Essex, proud patron of the "Essex girl" jokes, the mud flats of the retreating Thames, and marshes. However, as I was barely into my double digits, all I saw was that we were on an adventure.

For the holidays, my sister Mimi came to visit, which was an absolute delight. Despite my utter lack of what some would euphemistically call spirituality, Christmas has always been important to me. It is the rituals: the baking of the cookies, the cutting of the tree, the same songs sung every year, the huge, sprawling family parties. So knowing that I would be away from home, I fretted. I wondered how I would fill that void where all of the old traditions would normally be. And then Mimi announced that she was coming over for the holiday. It was a relief, to say the least; wherever we went at least I had family with me. 

And so we went to Leigh-on-Sea, to visit the family in whose house we lived for a year. 

As the Thames tide withdraws, it leaves behind it acres of mudflats and stranded boats. Often we would see children playing footy in the mud, hundreds of feet out into the flats.

I don't want to be cruel, but the juxtaposition of that sign and the beach itself is sad, in a hilarious way. 

That Gatsby-esque green light is actually a fish and chips cafe, featuring the logo of a chef bumblebee.

Most of you probably haven't heard about the death of Woolworth's, popularly known as Woolie's. It is, or was, a UK store chain that sold everything from candy to toasters to hair dryers to movies. And now it has gone broke, and shall be no more. It saddens me; we came upon this Woolie's in the town centre and I felt a faint wash of melancholy. It was a staple of High Streets across England; not fancy or posh, but sturdy. 

Things change, I suppose, even in England. The church graveyard was no different; the tombstones didn't seem to have drunkenly slouched over any more than they had before. The Leigh Library was the same; I could see into the dark room on the top floor of what was once a Vicarage, into the room where we would sit for hours on hard wooden benches, reading French comic books. I remember, with a clarity that surprises me, being a young girl looking at an extravagant ivory wedding dress in the windows of a shop on the corner near the bakery where we would buy chocolate haystacks; now, if it is not the very same dress still in that window, it is certainly its doppelganger. 

But the house that we used to live in changed; there were new carpets and the shed in the garden was different. The room that Mimi and I slept in had a new set of closets, and the attic that had seemed so haunted at the time was now just small, dark, and ordinary. We had left a decade ago, and now were interlopers in a place that had been gradually changing without us there to notice it.