Bathing Boxes and Ice Cream Good and Bad

We went back to the bathing boxes while the sun was still shining.  We walked the length of the beach and took photos, generally acting like all the other tourists who were doing the same thing.

Some of the bathing boxes were in use and very salubrious they were too. A gentleman lolled comfortably in his cane chair, wine bottle and glasses on the table beside him and classical music wafting from his portable speakers. He steadfastly ignored the tourists traipsing past his open bathing-box doors and acted as if the beach before him was magnificently empty.  A little further along a happy group had fenced off the patch of beach immediately in front of their box and sat at a formal dining table with (again) wineglasses and napkins and all the accoutrements of a very civilised dining room and not a beach full of people intent on furthering their Instagram reach.

Just so you know, the Brighton bathing boxes are actually at Dendy beach, not Brighton at all, but we're not going to get too picky about that 

The Brighton Boxes are a remnant of the many bathing boxes which lined Port Phillip Bay in the late 19th century.  They survived both the assaults of nature and the vagaries of public policy, partly due to a vocal group of bathing box afficiandos who, forming the Brighton Bathing Box Association, went in to bat for the boxes whenever they were threatened with removal.  The boxes lined up like sentries of uniform scale and proportion, but the licenees of the boxes went wild with colour schemes and decorations.  The result was lapped up by tourists and now nobody talks about removing the boxes and everyone fights for licences to sell ice creams to the tourists in the car parks instead.

Carried away with the tourist vibe, I succumbed to the temptation of a soft serve icecream which served (haha!) to remind me of why it was a very long time since I had eaten soft serve ice cream from ice cream vendors in car parks full of tourists.

Horrified to learn that BD had lived in Melbourne for over a year and not yet seen the Brighton Boxes, we brought her back on the next sunny day and did it all again.  Except for the soft serve ice cream - we went back to Brighton instead and bought some very expensive ice cream of Peanut Butter Marshmallow Fluff flavour. Then we went home, ate dinner, watched a movie, and totally forgot our PBMF flavoured ice cream in the freezer. After the movie I dropped the BD home, all the while not thinking about ice cream at all.  And so it went for a day or two until Roger had a light bulb moment and remembered our ice cream, languishing uneaten in the freezer.

So we ate it, and didn't even think about sharing it with BD. And let me tell you she didn't miss much because Peanut Butter Marshmallow Fluff as a flavour is infinitely better in theory than it is on the tastebuds.