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By William Shaw
Typography & design by
Richard Wolfströme
Exhibition and installation
by Standard 8
Website
Words William Shaw
Design Richard Wolfströme
Photography Kenny Laurenson
Publishing consultant Adrian Driscoll
Sponsored by
Anything can happen at this time of night
Above the seafront, at 65 Kings Road, The Beach Hut’s kiosk is a piece of faded Victorian beauty, open from mid-morning until the small hours of the night
It’s two in the morning and a blue man arrives at The Beach Hut café. He’s shirtless; but his head, face, arms and body are all painted bright blue.
"I’ll have a kebab," says the blue man.
Murat and Ahmet have been running the kiosk for over a year. Anything can happen at this time of night.
They love it here, half way between the street and the beach. They took it over when it was run down, painted it up, installed new equipment – a doner machine they call Angelina because she is so hot, a till they call Mozart because they love the music it makes. Now it makes them happy just to work here. Murat says he could never live inland; he and Ahmet grew up by the sea in Turkey. Every day the channel shines with a different colour; every day the sun goes down in a different way; every day there’s something new going on. In this ten-sided kiosk, it’s as if they’ve got ten TV screens, always showing something.
They don’t mind the drunks as long as they’re not causing trouble. The best way to talk to them is to remember that we’ve all been drunk at some time.
But tonight the blue man blinking in the bright glare of their counter looks sad. Murat asks, "So how is your life?"
"Not too good, not too good," says the blue man mournfully.
"Why?" says Murat. "What’s the matter? You’ve been to a club. You’ve had a good time..."
"Yeah," says the blue man. "But it could have been better."
"How could it be?" And the blue man explains that he has been trying to ask a girl to go out with him, to be his girlfriend. She turned him down. That’s why he’s so sad.
Sausages sizzle on the hotplate. Water boils in the urn. Waves crash on the shingle below. Ahmet says: "Maybe you should have tried a different colour."