Evocative music...

Sitting here munching on me breakfast this morning listening to Smooth FM (Isn't DAB radio great) and through the speaker grill comes the unmistakable first bar of "Sunny Afternoon" by The Kinks.

And instantly, through the power of brain association, its august 1966, England rules the world of football having just won the world cup a few weeks earlier, England rules the world of popular music with acts like The Beatles, The Who, The Stones and of course The Kinks virtually guaranteed number one hits on both sides of the Atlantic with every record release.

And the ten year old Jerrychicken rules this particular ten square feet of Cayton Bay beach with its magnificent daily castle constructions, battlements stretching as far as the eye can see and the constant to and fro-ing from the waters edge to fetch more water for the moat due to the lack of invention of a sandcastle moat pumping device, a situation that sadly still means that sandcastles are particularly susceptible to invasion via their dry moats.

Those days on the beach at Cayton Bay were long and hot, in my memory at least, and crowded with dozens and dozens of people that I didn't know, our dad was the most gregarious of people and within hours of arriving at the holiday camp he'd be organising complete strangers into football matches, cricket matches and sandcastle building competitions, in the space of a few days our spot on the beach (always the same spot on the beach) would be a gathering point for everyone and their deckchairs, picnics shared, beer bottles opened, sandy cups of tea passed around and the gabbing, chirping sounds of flocks of women gossiping would be interspersed by guffaws and racous laughter from the menfolk whilst partaking of a bottle of broon.

And kids, there would be hundreds of kids, dozens of footballs, a ton of jumpers to build goalposts from, twenty or thirty a side and a pitch that took up most of the foreshore when the tide was out, and when the dads joined in, slightly inebriated by mid afternoon, then the huge disorganised games of football would be interspersed every few minutes by the need for several kids to swim out to sea and fetch the ball back after a particulalry energetic attempt to kick the ball like Bobby Charlton by a dad who did not play the game from one Cayton Bay holiday to the next.

And in the middle of all of this chaos, this beach rabble, would be a portable radio, volume turned up full in a constant battle with the womens chattering, belting out the chart hits of the month, classics now every one of them, broadcast on a pirate radio station that was moored somewhere out in the North Sea and had Scarborough in its footprint - memory tells me it was Radio Caroline but research makes me doubt this as this vessel was moored off the Essex coast and surely would not have been receieved oop north, maybe it was, whatever, pirate radio was the only radio of choice to the descerning pop music listener in 1966 as the Governments very own BBC poured scorn on anything recorded after 1950.

And as I type this another song from the era is playing on Smoth FM - "Monday, Monday" by The Mamas and Papas - people ask how I remember loads of this stuff, music is the answer, for a young lad who's life was filled with music from dusk to dawn (I have my father to thank for that) then music is the key and every tune unlocks another memory.