Susan Morrison: Ah, Portobello in the summer – sun, sea and sewage
Saw what you did there, weather. I start moaning about the serious absence of sunny days and you suddenly dial down the rain and hit the sunshine switch.
Of course, in a spectacularly Scottish win-one-lose-one fashion, a blazing day heralded a warning from SEPA that the water off Porty was basically a chemical soup. A whole smorgasbord of micro yucks were partying in the surf, just waiting to be rehomed in a gut near you. These are pets you do not want to take home.
Our Victorian sewage systems are having a bit of a breakdown. It's astonishing they’ve lasted as long as they have.
When I was a kid, few Scottish seaside town beaches such as Portobello or Girvan were without the added attraction of the sewage pipe running out to sea.
Much fun was to be had chasing smaller siblings out along its rusting, barnacle- encrusted length. We were warned, of course, never to jump into the sea in front of the outlet, but just about anywhere else was fair game, even when the tide was washing those distinctive muddy waves back in.
Naturally, this is the point where I should say, by heck, paddling in poo never did me any harm, but I’m not sure this was actually true.
Wee tummy upsets were suspiciously common. A remedy was readily available. What you needed was a bottle of Kaolin and Morphine.
Kaolin is a kind of clay, possibly to bung up the business end of the human waste disposal unit. And morphine is, yes, morphine. A fairly powerful, trippy drug.
And we gave this stuff to kids. We must have been mildly off our trolleys. No wonder we loved those lurid psychedelic ice-lollies.
Seafield is doing its best, I have no doubt. We know it's doing its job. We can smell it cooking away on warm days, reminding us just how much gunk is bubbling in those tanks.
It does make you wonder if any new little horrors are cross-breeding in there. Might be worth hunting down some of that spaced out clay for battles with any new belly bothering bugs.