Brighton Beach BBQ

Friday afternoon AC forwarded me an invitation from one of his office mates who had a birthday recently:

It said something like this:

Birthday BBQ at the beach!
6:30 at the burned out pier. 7:00 we’ll grill burgers and sausages. Bring fancy foods and beverages.

I IM’ed AC and asked, “What are fancy foods?” I was picturing mini-quiches and prosciutto-wrapped melon balls. Petits fours and profiteroles.

A little while later he got back to me. “Apparently, fancy foods are anything other than burgers and sausages.”

Fair enough. I cut up some strawberries and oranges and figured that should be more than fancy enough.

AC picked Sam and me up at the flat and we walked down to the beach near the “burned out pier.” The “burned out pier” is apparently the fancy term for the “west pier,” which I wrote about last fall here.

Hunkered down near a low stone wall were several of AC’s office mates. Black smoke was pumping out from what I first took to be two small Hibachi grills. The office mates tending to the burgers and sausages on the grills were giggling and guffawing. There were already lots of empty beer cans.

And some of those beer cans were being put to good use– as spatulas for the grill.

“We remembered everything– the food, the beer, the grills– and we started cooking the burgers and sausages and THEN we realized we had nothing to turn them with!”

They were so proud to tell of their ingenuity.

“Then HE had the brilliant idea of using a flattened beer can!”

Mind you, these are programmers of a 3-D virtual world. Using a smashed beer can to flip a burger.

I later learned that before someone had the beer can idea, the birthday boy himself tried flipping his burger with his credit card. “It didn’t work,” he told me. “And it melted the edge of the card a bit.”

I also later learned that the grills weren’t Hibachis but disposable charcoal grills that one can buy in the supermarkets here. They (and the beer can spatulas) did the job though. It was a delightful beach BBQ. There was conversation, pebble-skipping in the water, running around (that was Sam), kite-flying (that was AC), skateboarding (these were the beer can flippers) and a little girl being tossed around upside by her father (you know who that was). What AC and Sam were doing looked like so much fun that one of the office mates jumped into the arms of another and asked to be held upside down too.

You know that beer cans are quite a bit larger in the UK than in the US, right?

When it got dark and colder we went in and put Sam to bed and the BBQers went to the pub. AC joined them later.

Pub culture made so much sense to us last fall and winter, given the cold and the wet and the darkness. It was a treat to learn that there is beach culture for the spring and summer months. It just doesn’t replace the pub culture.

Another way to think of it is this: the pub is burgers and sausages. Everything else is just fancy foods.