Every day a sunny one in our memories (except in Bray)

Bray is a Victorian seaside town on the east coast of Ireland. My father was born and brought up there, and his parents ran a pharmacy on the Quinsboro Road just off Main Street. Dad ran his knitwear cooperative in a little building behind his parents’ house on the Herbert Road, and I had to walk from the train station to my grandparents’ house every day after school, to await my lift home. I hated Bray growing up – there was nothing really wrong with it, but it was the setting for all my teenage grievances, my constant social embarrassments, my failures to impress. Now it is a town full of Euro saver shops and fast-fashion boutiques, and a McDonald’s occupies the entire ground floor of the beautiful red-brick Victorian Town Hall.

I grew up about six miles from the town, which means that I’m not from Bray. Nonetheless my husband thinks it is very funny to say “You’re such a Bray girl,” which he has no right to do because (a) I’m NOT from Bray, and (b) he’s English, which automatically disqualifies him from slagging any Irish person’s hometown (or not, as in the case in point).

Bray has a very special redeeming feature in the form of a long seafront promenade along the water’s edge where the Irish Sea starts. It’s always packed with walkers, joggers, dogs and people on varying numbers of wheels. Along its length are ice cream parlours selling anything from your standard Irish ’99 (that’s a white swirl of soft vanilla ice cream in a cone with a Cadbury’s Flake sticking out the top) to much more fancy Celtic Tiger-esque Italian gelato in lots of flavours, with fancy prices to match. It’s far from gelato we were reared!

These two ice cream parlours are very much in the former vein. The one on the right is called Maud’s, but I suspect Maud may have a hand in both establishments, as the ice cream cones on the overhead signs are obviously designed and produced in the same factory, some of them having been cunningly reversed in Photoshop to give the illusion of a great variety of pictures of ice cream. Happily for Maud, my drawing is so inaccurate that this illusion is even more convincing.

Some people who saw this sketch spoke of how it evoked happy memories of visits to the seaside. That’s why I felt I had to give the full picture of my chequered experience of Bray. Thanks be to the heavens, those miserable teenage years are far behind me, and now Bray is a place where the wonderful things in my life are underlined. I’m lucky enough that my family and I often stay with my parents in their lovely home near Bray Head: after a walk along the Seafront, I buy my kids garishly-topped whipped ice creams at Maud’s, and we take a meandering walk up the hill to my folks’ house, past all the beautiful gardens and lovely Victorian houses.

There are funny little kiosks all along the Seafront selling all kinds of stuff (including ice creams). I don’t know how I didn’t notice that they are all painted in different candy-striped colours until earlier this year. I think it may be because they were painted pale gloss blue for ages, but my mother says they’ve been stripy for years. Maybe I refused to see them, like a prisoner who can’t go through the open door when he’s been released. The kiosks are actually adorable now, and I very much want to sketch them all. There is a sunshine-yellow striped one: a crushed-berry striped one: this blue one, and just wait until St. Patrick’s Day, when I will sketch, and post, the Kelly-green striped one, which is festooned with green, white and orange bunting, and sells green, white and orange balloons. Mmmm. I know all the sketchers are salivating at the thought. Add to this the hordes of people dressed in weird plastic leprachaun suits – just the facade of the leprechaun, mind – like the black guy I saw last year with a fake hairy red beard, fake stovepot hat with big gold buckle and fake pink plastic pot belly, and us sketchers are giddy with excitement. But the kiosk I drew here was a little more low-key.

 Normally passers-by have quite a bit to say when I’m drawing, and I love the interaction, but I was out of luck that day. Bray attracts a demographic who may or may not be avid sketchers, but the lovely thing was that the one or two people who did stop to talk to me became very thoughtful as they reminisced about how they used to love drawing as a kid. I always evangelise them immediately, and urge them to take up urban sketching. Most people were more interested in those huge inflatable balls and the Hello Kitty and Homer Simpson inflatable dolls, and I heard a young lady complaining about one of those games where you have to hit a target for a prize or something.

“Ye have to do it tree or fower times before you even GET de teddy,” she said – I hope that’s easily translated into whatever English you’re more used to.

From my parents’ house, there’s an amazing vista of the Seafront wrapping its way along the water’s edge, with a row of those beautiful Victorian houses lining the road that runs along its length. One side is all buildings and funfairs and stuff, the other is a great sheet of blue sea: I will make a point of drawing it the next time I’m up.

I won’t be drawing the Euro shops though…no matter how brightly-coloured.

More of my work here.