During the recent one-day heatwave, I visited Margate by myself and discovered that going to the seaside as a solo guy isn’t as great as going with my fiancée.
Firstly, without your partner or kids, you can’t go swimming in the sea because you have no one to look after your phone, money and belongings and a guy paddling alone is just deemed weird.
You can’t walk along the beach and say a cheery “hello” to young, smiling happy families nor go into amusement arcades or walk casually around Dreamland or go on any rides by yourself without concerned parents ushering their children away from you, mistaking you for the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
If you’re hot, you can’t buy yourself an ice cream or lolly to lick along the road to cool down as it looks stupid with no one beside you to share the experience.
I can’t buy a stick of rock for myself without pretending “it’s for my small son” who, in reality is 19 years old and 6ft 3” and doesn’t even like rock.
Entering a restaurant, I have to ask for a table for one in the quietest, remotest corner and watch people thinking I’m so ugly, I’ve been stood up on a Tinder date.
I can’t visit the Turner Gallery without constantly holding the front of my neck and feigning interest in every exhibit and painstakingly reading every description card as if I’m a worldly art critic and then forgetting everything I’ve read just 4 seconds later.
But the worst thing about my trip was visiting shops just to browse and walking around each one with my hands firmly in my pockets to prove I’m not a shoplifter and then, when entering my 7th shop, having bought precisely nothing from the previous six, hear over a walkie-talkie: “Beware the shifty badly sunburnt guy with the blue back-pack.”
Seriously, as if I was gonna steal anything from Poundland?
Next time, I’ll take my partner with me.
Russ Writes 
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