Barbarossa Beach

The moment I said it was time to go, Billie Stormzy has been shouting: “To sea!” Unfortunately, I didn’t mean that – we had to bring his big sister to school first, much to his chagrin. But once we dropped his sister off, and put some shovels, buckets and rakes in our bag, we immediately set for the northern beaches. Arriving before 9:00, and the holidays over, it was useless to try and get breakfast – the earliest opportunity would probably be at 10:00, when some beach clubs at least open their kitchen. So we first walked all the way to where the sand started to get wet, sat down and enjoyed the beach in the early morning.

It was still quiet at the beach. The weather has been very nice for more than a week now – nicer, indeed, than it was for most of the summer. A few people walked past us as we sat there, some on their phone, engaged in heated business conversations. Billie Stormzy wanted me to help him fill a bucket with send, then said he wanted me to make a tower by turning the bucket upside down. We repeated this a few times, then he started to take out some of the balls that were also in the bag and throwing them around. All the time, he stayed firmly on my lap. An elderly lady walked by, stripped completely naked and waded into the sea. A little later, a young couple a little further did the same and for a moment, I doubted whether I had accidentally sat down at the nude beach – but no, that was a little further off. The couple, at least, put on some swimming clothes after a while, then also waded into the sea.  Billie Stormzy turned his attention from his toys to me, and started to climb me, told me to lay down, and then jumped on me, laughing loudly. This game was repeated several times, but then I told him breakfast might be ready. We gathered our stuff, and putting him on my shoulders, we walked back to the beach clubs.

The waiters at the first beach club we came to, Culpepper, had previously walked past us for an early morning swim before work. They told me that, unfortunately, the kitchen wouldn’t open before 11. Next door Barbarossa Beach, however, was in business. We sat down close to the playhouse in front of the main beach club and the manager came by to bring the menu and take my order for a tea. Billie Stormzy wanted to go to the slings immediately, but I told him we better first order – and I hoped that would be soon,  because he was being very impatient. BA very friendly young waitress brought us my tea, and I ordered scrambled eggs on toast, with salad, asparagus and avocado with her – mainly because that was a combination I had never seen before and the set breakfast looked a bit uninteresting.

Billie Stormzy could wait no longer and we went to the playhouse. After sitting on the sling for some time, while I pushed him gently – not too hard, because it was a sling without anything to hold on to – he climbed up the stairs of the playhouse and went down the slide, repeating this several times. He’d just had enough of that, when our
breakfast arrived. “Let’s go and eat eggs,” I told him and he enthusiastically followed me: “Yes! Eggs!”

His enthusiasm didn’t wane. While I tried to eat my toast, he was bouncing up and down, shouting “Egg! Egg!” loudly, disturbing the peace and quiet atmosphere at Barbarossa’s terraces. Whenever I didn’t feed him some more scrambled eggs quick enough because I was trying to get some of the toast with asparagus and avocado in my mouth, he would simply shout even louder. There was a tense moment when I smuggled some avocado together with the egg into his mouth. He looked at me a bit hurt, then opened his mouth and let all that was in it fall out. “Just egg!” he told me, and then started shouting again: “Egg! Egg!”

It didn’t really fit the surroundings. Barbarossa is a bit of a posh place: entirely in marine blue, white and wood, with the beach club itself designed in a style that reminds me of what was considered modern architecture in the 1950s; all straight lines and glass. All in all, it has a very French Riviera chique feel to it. On the sound system, there were mostly songs from the disco era – not disco songs themselves, but light listening pop songs. “Fernando” by ABBA, for instance. The entire beach club seemed designed for a quiet, refined way of enjoying a day at the sea with a good glass of something and at one moment, certainly, champagne and oysters – not, in any case, for a rowdy toddler shouting “Egg!” Meanwhile, I was trying to get the attention of the waitress – my eggs could do with some salt. She was busy, together with a colleague, putting expensive-looking wine glasses on every table – thankfully, there were none on our low table right at the beach, with some lounge couches around it. I am sure in his current mood, Billie Stormzy would not have left them standing.

Finally, I managed to give her a slight wave and she came by. I asked for some salt and peper, as well as a latte macchiato, the way I like it: with oatmilk and an extra shot of espresso. When she brought it, I had just finished my breakfast. The first few sips tasted great, but then Billie Stormzy managed to knock it almost out of my hand, sending a wave of foam over one of the pillows. Luckily, it was only the foam, but somehow it tasted a little less good after that – only slightly though, this still being one of the very best coffees I’ve had in a Scheveningen beach club so far. I managed to somewhat clean up the pillow, with the aid of some napkins and wet wipes from Billie Stormzy’s bag.

Soon, we were all settled again. The little one had calmed down considerably, and was now laying on my lap, clearly getting sleepy after all that excitement. When I’d finished my latte and said we should go home, he immediately agreed.
“But first,” I said, “we need to pay.”
“I want to pay,” Billie Stormzy said. Not a question, a command. I gave him my card and he actually managed to hold the card just right when the waitress held the reader in front of him. I still needed to enter my pin code, though, and when I had picked up my bags, Billie Stormzy was running ahead already, repeatedly exclaiming “My card! My card!”, holding up my banking card triumphantly. I decided to let him for a while, since he was in such a good mood. When we got to our bicycle, he benignly said “Daddy’s card” and gave it back to me before I picked him up to put him in his seat.

 Also on Breakfast at the Beach: Jump back in time to when I visited this place with Rihanna Gaga in 2014