I do like to be beside the seaside

Confined to barracks today with a dose of the exhausting lurgie which toddler Tom brought back from nursery in the week, appeared to shrug off in a day or so and passed on to both his parents, reducing them to apathetic snivelling wrecks (no mean feat - it usually takes a week at work to do that to us). Surfing the net to keep my flagging spirits up, I stumbled on two images of bathing machines, originally found on Dark Roasted Blend.

The first photo was taken close to my birthplace in Scarborough, towards the end of the nineteenth century - long before I was born, although in my current poorly state, I feel as if I'm old enough to have been there in person. I like the Scarborough picture because it's rather strange and beautiful, a scene from a truly lost world; the bathing machines in which Victorian bathers preserved their modesty whilst changing in and out of their voluminous swimming garments, and in the distance, the ghostly sails of the fishing fleet dissolving and dwindling into the past. Only the sand and the sea remains.

The second image stirs rather different feelings - it's the personal bathing machine of His Majesty, King Alfonso XIII of Spain (Order of the Golden Fleece, Order of Charles III, Order of Santiago, Supreme Order of the Clueless Jug-Eared Inbred Parasite, etc, etc, etc). It's a vast, ornate juggernaut, like an architectural wedding cake, trundling down to the sea on two railway tracks. It's both an extraordinary object that seems to belong in some steampunk science fantasy and a monument to the pampered excesses of a King whose inept and extravagant reign in one of Europe's most unequal and poverty-ridden countries paved the way to to a Spanish Republic and exile in Mussolini's Italy. Even when Franco had demolished the Republic and put the wealthy, the army and church back in charge, Alfonso was, apparently too useless, to be invited back - Franco's rule turned into an interregnum, whilst he tried to bring Alfonso's grandson Juan Carlos up as a good little Falangist, to ensure the continuation of his vile little dictatorship. Fortunately his cunning plan for the succession a complete failure and the monarchy is now mostly a constrained appendage to a liberal democracy - although the Spanish Royals are still inclined to fly into a petulant and litigious strop when the citizens of said liberal demoracy display less servile respect than their "betters" expect as their due.