Stolen Beach Chairs At the Center Parcs

Officially, I’m on vacation this week. Holiday. Holiday at a
Center Parcs only a short drive from
our home but a great place to get away and spend some days swimming around in
the giant pool complex. But my vacation was interrupted by a breakdown in
British culture. A shocking breakdown that makes me fear the worst, the theft of
a beach chair.

You’ve probably heard the stories about Brits lining up in an orderly
fashion. A French friend of mine told a story of how she was berated that "in
this country, we queue religiously" by an older British woman after she became
confused and went to the wrong part of a line when visiting the UK.

It’s pretty much true. The Brits do line up, especially in England. And this
getting-in-lineness translates in another way, reserving spaces on the beach.

The Brits are renowned for this, to my understanding. If they head off for a
sun holiday, there’s a rush in the morning to slap towels and beachmats down to
reserve a spot on the sand. The towels go down, then the people head back to
sleep more, get breakfast or do other things. The towels ensure they’ll have a
spot for when they’re ready to enjoy the sun.

Apparently, the only people better at this than the Brits are the Germans.
They’ll arrive even earlier, frustrating British domination of the beaches. Or
perhaps I have it backwards. The point is, the reserving of beach space isn’t
something I’d ever encountered before coming to Europe.

I’m from California. We have lots of beach. Lots of it. Even on the busiest
day I can think of in Newport Beach, say a Fourth Of July weekend, there was no
need to be putting down towels to ensure you had a space on the beach. So the
idea of towel reserving bemuses me. But on the plus side, I’ve never had to do
it. When we go on a sun holiday, it’s never to a place where the Brits tend to
congregate. We go back home to California.

The exception to this is visiting Center Parcs. There’s no beach here.
Instead, there’s that huge pool complex I mentioned. It all sits beneath a glass
dome, complete with palm trees and other tropical vegetation. It reminds me of
that movie Caveman or Iceman or whatever, where they defrost a caveman found in
the Arctic and revive him within a special warm environment under a dome to try
and make him believe he’s still in the past. I’d look it all up, but my cell
phone signal here gives me access to the web at like 14.4K, so I’ll skip the
finer details.

Around the pool are beach chairs and the occasional tables. There are far
more people than the seating arrangements can fit. Really, that shouldn’t be a
problem. Most of the time, everyone is swimming. In fact, most of the time these
tables sit empty and unused.

Unused, but not unreserved. Towels, inner tubes/rubber rings, robes, bags –
you name it, all this stuff is plunked down to hold tables and chairs. It’s very
British, very orderly and very respected.

So there I am today, sitting on a fake rock and taking a break, since I’d
failed to arrive at 9am to reserve an actual chair. I looked over the sea of
reserved seating arrangements to spy a new family arriving, assessing the
situation with much disgust. And then they started seizing chairs.

A woman in the group walked over, picked up the towel reserving the chair and
placed it on the table. Then she left with the chair.

Amazing! Unbelievable! I struggle to find the right metaphor to describe the
shocking behavior. It would be as if she walked over to someone talking on a
cell phone and just grabbed the phone out of their hand. It’s just not done.
That chair "belonged" to someone else, as the haphazardly placed towel so
clearly made it know.

With my jaw literally dropped, I then watched as she seized another chair.
Then a man in the group came from behind one of the palm plants with a third,
then went back for a fourth. Stolen chairs. Hot seats!

To be honest, there ought to be a better way. Maybe a bunch of folding tables
and chairs that you take when you need and return to a common area for others to
use, when you’re done. But that’s not how it goes.

Still, society didn’t break down in the end. People did continue to mark
tables and chairs in the regular way, swooping in for when choice spots were
officially abandoned. Indeed, the family I watched did the same thing when a
better location complete with table opened up. And later I moved towels from our
reserved rocks to an actual table and chair setup, when properly abandoned by
the previous owners. I am, after all, a guest in the country