Somewhere along the coach ride from Durham to Tynemouth Longsands, I heard my friend Poppy remarking that a fellow second-year, Nathan, looked like a typical British dad dressed for a day at the beach: Hawaiian shorts, Christmas socks, with Scotch eggs and pork pies in hand. He couldn’t have sounded more like a typical British child, incessantly nagging Polly, the ever patient social sec, with the age-old question of ‘are we there yet?’. We all felt his impatience though, so when the coach finally did arrive, we nodded along to the warnings that the coach would leave at 3:45pm sharp and descended upon the welcoming swathes of sand with the fervour of those too long enclosed in the Durham Bubble.

The morning quickly passed with digging, paddling and exploring. In the early afternoon barefooted students swarmed the town’s fish and chip shops, the smell of salty frying fish deliciously mingling with briny sea breezes. A luxurious laziness settled over us all as the day warmed and people either took up casual games of rounders or football, dipped into the water or contented themselves with watching. The time for departure came around all too soon. We packed up and left as quickly as we came, already longing for next year. Naturally, it was a group of fourth years who only just made it back to the coach as the driver revved the engine. As a foreigner, I could not have been more delighted than to be part of this perennial British ritual. Most entertaining of all was seeing the number of pasty white bodies shining incandescently in the year’s first mild sun – evidence of a long rainy winter just past, and of many more summer days to come.