Stones throw

I went to Brighton the other day. Well not the other day, whenever the hell it was. Brighton, famous for Brighton rock, as much because of the pebbly beach as the crab stick style sweet. Whose idea was the pebbly beach? Some right fucking idiot - it's a beach, but it's got stones on it! Why not go the whole hog and just have a beach made up of broken glass? (Not unheard of, apparently.) Who designed the pebbly beach? To what end do you have a perfectly nice seafront, perfectly respectable piers and arcades, all in the service of a beach that constantly stabs your feet and leaves red marks on your arse?

Is there any other country that even has the pebbly beach? I've never heard of one. If they do, they're obviously keeping very quiet about it. They obviously realise that a pebbly beach is no sort of beach at all. In other countries, pebbly beaches (if they exist at all) have totally different names, like 'harbour' or 'disused land'.

Do you remember the first time you went to the seaside and it was a pebbly beach? How you never trusted your parents about anything again? The miserable sand castles? Throwing sand in someone's face and giving them a black eye? Trying to bury someone and accidentally stoning them to death? Being carted off by the police and taken to a care home where you fell into the all-consuming darkness, before being spat out the other end a severely damaged hopeless drug addict, violent criminal and all-round bad egg? Because of the stones, that's why, because of the stones.