6,000 teenagers on a beach? What could possibly go wrong?

ATEENAGE beach party sounds like quite the thing. We have seen so many beach parties in American high school movies and we know exactly what they are like. They are jam packed with tanned young women and young men with abdomens like a packet of bread rolls.

There is a bonfire, and a boy with a guitar, whom nobody, unaccountably, wants to lamp, and, perhaps, a racy keg of beer.

Sitting on a blanket are a man and woman, who appear to be in their late twenties but are still at high school, talking about their future until they are interrupted by some good-natured high-jinks perpetrated by the the couple’s best comic relief friend. This friend is the only person on the beach whose midriff expands when he sits down.

We at Dave suspect that the teenage shindig that took place on the beach at Troon in Scotland last Tuesday diverged from the standard movie beach party in a number of respects.

Firstly the number of participants was on the high side. The party, which was publicised on Facebook, attracted an estimated 6,000 teenagers.

Secondly, the attendants at American movie beach parties are usually golden and chilled, rather than, as a mum at Troon described the partygoers, “sunburnt and steaming”.

Thirdly, American movie beach parties rarely require the attendance of police, and then reinforcements when those police aren’t enough.

But nobody has considered the environmental cost of having so many teenagers on a beach at the same time. And we are not talking about all the bottles and cans left behind on the sand.

Shortage of Lynx Not the animal, although they are also extremely thin on the ground. A party with 6,000 teenagers is going to have at least 3,000 teenage boys, or at least 5,000 teenage boys, if the parties this writer attended as a teenager is any indication.

That means shops within a 10-mile radius will be stripped of all supplies of Lynx Africa. It is just a good job that there aren’t any CFCs in aerosols these days, or there would be a new hole in the ozone layer over Ayrshire the size of Luxembourg. Sound pollution Not from the music played on the beach, or even the happy sounds of pale blue-skinned Scots becoming “sunburnt and steaming”, but at some point the police would have told the teenagers to move on. Can you imagine how loud it would be if 6,000 teenagers tutted and said “Oh, it’s not fair. You’re not my real dad” at the same time? Not to mention the wind caused by them all swinging their arms.

Hormonal imbalance All of those teenage hormones in the sea at the same time? There are going to be a lot of hairy fish caught off the south west of Scotland over the next few months, that’s all we can say...