If you were about to conjure images of a semi-clad Leonardo DiCaprio, I advise against it, you'll only be disappointed.
Although the beach, along with my holiday, is now a distant memory, I had the draft for this written so you're getting it anyway!
I don't know about you, but a beach is integral to my summer jollies. The thought of a holiday spent in the mountains or doing anything other than toasting myself to within an inch of crisp is simply not a holiday. Sightseeing is for the cooler months and city excursions are for weekends, but summer holidays must include a beach where my body can recover and recharge after the toil inflicted upon it during the arduous twelve months.
Year after year I honed this practise into an unfailing formula when I would return from a fortnights R and R and launch head first back into the stresses and strains of daily life with gusto, ready to thwart fatigue and rugby tackle stress.(For a week at least!) Until, that is, (you can guess where this is going can't you?) children stamped all over my perfectly cultivated formula with their tiny, little feet rendering the point to my holiday null and void from our first venture together.
My days at the beach, as they were once enjoyed, consisted of swimming, reading, listening to music, people watching and sleeping; in a nutshell - slobbing. At the risk of sounding strange, I am at pains to find a more luxurious sensation than waking gently to the sounds of lapping waves and mellow chatter in foreign lilts while my bones crack after having spent an hour asleep on the bare earth with nothing more than a straw mat for padding. You can keep your swanky health spas; so long as my chin is plastered in my own dribble and I have a perfect impression of my beach towel imprinted on my cheek, I'm in paradise! Once full consciousness had been restored, I would then saunter into the sea, stomach sucked in, oblivious to the fact that half my bikini bottoms had worked their way up my bum. I could only guess at the positions I adopted while in my public land of nod. Happy days indeed!
Much as with 'Walkies' (blog #14), when it took the entire morning to get out of the house to walk the dog, a black hole similarly sucked away our time when fraught mornings were spent gathering equipment and applying sunscreen in layers so thick a flame thrower couldn't penetrate, in an attempt to reach the beach before the dreaded clock struck 12pm when we would have to race back under the cover of shadows to avoid the slightest ray of post midday sun touching their delicate pink skin.
If, by some stroke of order, we managed to reach Mecca for 10am, I would hastily unpack the plethora of buckets, spades, revolving things, seahorse moulds and plastic sieves that had threatened to break our backs in their transport, in the never dying hope that Chicken and Tuna might be occupied sufficiently to allow me a little time in which to tan my hide to leather like in the good old days.
There is clearly a law declaring that desperation should never, under any circumstances, be rewarded. Not only did the buckets, spades, revolving things, seahorse moulds and plastic sieves sustain their interest for no more than four and a half minutes, but even my enthusiastic attempts at building a sandcastle were met with alarmed expressions while I knocked seven bells out of Ariel on the side of their bucket only to produce a 'plop'. Their indifference to the point of boredom left me exasperated to the point of adoption.
Chicken and Tuna, as toddlers, just didn't get the point. The soft shingle should have proved a sensory mystery as it ran through their inquisitive fingers, rather than the child torture they deemed it to be. Each time their hands grabbed mindlessly at the tiny, smooth stones, they would look at their palms in horror as though they had plunged their hands into a vat full of scorpions before thrusting them at me to rid them of the vile offender.
As for the sea; how dare I allow the gentle swell to lap over their feet - was I mad? It was wet! Defeated, I would begin packing away our beach paraphernalia while casting dagger like glances at the mothers smugly achieving their all over tans while lazily watching over their offspring frolicking predictably in the surf like the children of my dreams.
So, for the past ten years, when offered words of sympathy in the form of the old adage "A change is as good as a rest", I would respond either, b******s or, "Why didn't I stick to dogs?"!
