The birth of Beach
Shdes of Beach. © C Goodland / Beach Thorncombe
Today, Beach is just my pen name. A non de plume. A pseudonym. However, it is also an online representation of me that has been in use since September 1999, when I first created a public profile on a Mutual Friendship website.
That site was very basic back then, allowing for a username, just one picture and a profile description. The username I chose for that first profile was “On The Beach”.
But why did I choose “On The Beach” as my online moniker?
Neveille Shute's dystopian novel documenting the catastrophic post nuclear war "end of the world" scenario mirrored exactly how I felt after my own 20 year love astory of a marriage imploded; just prior to my own complete mental breakdown.
Apocalyptic Breakdown of Life
On the Beach is a classic novel written by Neville Shute and it has a particularly appropriate plot-line because in the book, the world lies in tatters, having been devastated by a thermonuclear war.
The story follows the last pockets of humanity attempting to survive the post-apocalyptic, end of world scenario, they find themselves in.
I felt in the same situation when I let my passion for business interfere with my 20 year love story of a marriage. A marriage that imploded spectacularly with fearsome consequences and fallout as the Gravity Venture grew more invasive and successful.
On The Beach, therefore, easily qualified as an appropriate screen name to reflect wher I was back in late 1999 when I joined Midsummer, an online mutual friendship site started that same year.
East beach. © C Goodland / Beach Thorncombe
My West Dorset Coast
There were other reasons for choosing the screen-name also because Bridport harbour, (renamed West Bay with the arrival of the train and subsequent tourists in 1884), was always my spiritual home, way, way before I ever actually moved from Yeovil to Bridport so the sentiment On The Beach also qualifies, being a location I am always content and happy to be near or involved with.
The wilds of West Dorset, even today, remain, largely, undiscovered and explored when compared to the neighbouring counties of Devon or Cornwall and I have delighted in escaping this 20th / 21st century world by losing myself in the tangled pathways of an old smuggler’s route or by exploring a rarely visited stretch of beach or secret cove nestled under the prehistoric cliffs the county is famous for.
Couple on beach. © C Goodland / Beach Thorncombe
A Tongue in Cheek Dig
I hold a third, tongue in cheek, reason for choosing the On The Beach screen name because the whole world over, a significant number of people unimaginatively fill out friendship or dating site profiles with the entirely predictable … “I like to relax with a movie, a bottle of wine or a walk … on the beach.”
Such lack lustre and stereo-typical self summaries used to frustrate me and I would wonder, (and still ponder), why people even bother writing such accounts of their perceived aspirations or desires when, perhaps, they might have found something more original to present on their personal web pages.
However, none of this really matters. it being just fluff and froth compared to the real reason Beach came into existence.
But why?
Why did I find myself creating a parallel persona to live my life through?
After all. I was just joining an online friendship site, wasn't I?
And why, (only with hindsight), can I claim that as Chris, I even needed a Jekyll and Hyde style alter ego called Beach to even exist at all?
Well ...
The answer is disturbing ...
And I need time, a certain resolve and your own patience, (in reading these words), to fully explain and justify my reasoning.
Nevertheless ... I can tell you ... I can reassure you that without the manifestation of Beach, I would not be alive today to even be here to relate the following ...
Let me try to explain.
Suicide
I came close to it back in December 1999 after my blissful, 20 year, love story of a marriage crumbled as a result of me getting too immersed in business.
To offer an insight into how someone well loved and, seemingly, stable might ever consider doing something like taking their own life, I'll relate my own humble little story. Before I start, though, let me say that, today, my life is absolutely sublime and nothing remotely like what I am going to be recalling below.
My own adventure has since taught me that there is a secret to life, (and the living of it), that cannot be learned by word of mouth or from a book or from some role model or any belief system or religion.
Wisdom is not a portable commodity that can be shared or traded with others, it being an entirely internal experience …
And here's mine!
1999
I'd become so passionate, obsessed, with filing my world patents, pursuing R & D, developing my technology and investing a 7 figure sum to fund the tooling and manufacturing of my products that I just lost sight of the perfect life I already had with Jackie and the children before I even started the venture.
At the time, by winning local, regional, national and then international innovation and business awards and accolades, it all felt like I was doing the right thing, striving to get on as society expects of us and I guess it worked because I ended up Chairman of my company with a big salary, a Lexus LS400 limo, a couple of boats bobbing up and down in the harbour, TV exposure, stuff in glossy mags and press and was the local guy who did good in my own community.
But when I'd eventually found time to pause for a moment to look up after I'd realised my commercial dreams, I expected to hear folk say, “Wow Chris, you did it. You actually realised all those impossible things you promised you would do!”
Well. It wasn't quite like that because the world I had known, the people I had known, the family I had known … had all changed.
Everyone else seemed exactly the same but, from my perspective, everything was entirely different; as if I'd, somehow, just been thrust out of a time machine and returned to a parallel universe that I had no right to be a part of.
The mental inertia involved in slowing down, (from the velocity I had allowed my mind to reach in pursuing the venture), ripped and tore at my psyche as I made the adjustment to return back to real life … and the guilt of feeling and knowing that I had selfishly immersed myself within my own ferocious creativity, FOR YEARS, finally hit home …
Except I now didn't have a home, not with my family anyway. Instead, in a rented flat in town, I buried my head in a pillow, wondering how it had come to this.
Why had I allowed business and a steel and plastic gadget to take precedence over the girl who had loved me for nearly two decades? Why hadn't I listened to my friends and family warning me this would happen?
Losing Jackie and the loving security of the family home traumatised me. Added to that, the icebergs of guilt were taking their toll and the act of waking each morning resulted in a sickening, nauseous, 4 dimensional understanding that my previous perfect life was truly over.
Sleep
Sleep is supposed to be an escape. Sleeping is supposed to be nature's way of allowing us to escape from reality. Sleep provides us a layby to park in on our metaphorical journey down life's highway. Sleep is the ding, ding of the bell that offers us some respite between bouts in our boxing duels with life. Sleep is the solid stone walls of sanctuary where we can regroup our forces.
But, by this time, sleep wasn't any of those things for me.
Instead, sleep brought me panic anxiety, night terror, incubus and nightmares. Sleep unlocked and let out all the demons and devils I might have managed to dismiss during the day.
Sleep was the only perceivable, possible place I might have had as respite from the reality of the hell on toast I was experiencing during my waking hours but …
No.
There was no escape from the adrenalin rushing FEAR of my own existence.
Though, at the risk of sounding pedantic. It wasn't really that I wanted to end my life. Rather, with nowhere, (seemingly), to go or 'be' in my breathing, living body, I just found myself yearning and yearning and yearning for somewhere PEACEFUL … somewhere STILL … somewhere CALM … somewhere FREE of everything I have outlined above!
Thus …
The day came … the hour came … the moment came where I realised I could stop the nauseating, sickening, ominous drain on my own psyche.
I realised I could end this torture ... by ending my life.
Laundrette Day
I sat on a bench watching the world go by.
It appeared, as I
watched bus drivers driving buses and road sweepers picking up litter
and girls sitting at tills as if everyone, (except me), had lovers
and warm hearths and LIVES to go back home to …
I looked back down
West Street where the entrance to my horrible, demon filled flat was
… and knew that if I walked back inside the door, it would soon all
be over … and then I spotted the sign.
“HOSPITAL”
I walked, not West
but North … to The Hughes Clinic, a mental health unit.
Pressing the bell in
a lobby filled with brightly coloured pastel paintings, a woman slid
open a glass screen and said, “Can I help?”
I smiled and said,
“Hiya, Can I talk to somebody? I think I want to take my life”.
She smiled back and
said, “Sure. If you'd like to sit down on the sofa, I'll find
somebody to see you”.
And she did. His name was Danny and after we chatted a while about philosophy, psychology and the fascinating perils of being Human … well … he saved my life!
