I’m a very possessive person. Not that I don’t like to share my stuff. Come round to mine for a barbecue or a cup of tea and it’s ‘mi casa es su casa’. You want to borrow a book? Fine. Drive my car? Go ahead.
No. I’m possessive of my space. I have my spot on the bus. I have my table in the cafe. But most of all, I have my beach.
My beach is really two beaches, in the far southwest of Cornwall. When the tide is low you can walk from one to the other, but when it turns they become separate, each accessible only by a precipitously steep cliff path.
The path is tortuous, but when you get there my beach is magical. A hidden, inaccessible, secret world of golden sand, rocks for climbing and blue sea for swimming. It’s a place to take a Trangia to cook bacon for breakfast and sausages for tea, a place where everything of work and grind and aggravation is left behind.
So it’s incredibly annoying that other people like it too, because what I want from my holiday is to be as far away from other people as possible.
Trouble is, so does everybody else. It makes me tense. The dilemma, then, is how, as a grumpy and antisocial old so-and-so, do I share my magical beach?
One answer, or course, is to go early, pick the best spot, spread out and stay late, making everyone else work around me. Or, and I don’t recommend this, claim the whole thing like the two Frisbee-playing naturists who spanned the entire width of the cove one day last week with their expert, naked disc-skimming.
No. The simple truth is that I have to learn to live with the neighbours.
This has always been an issue for me, and not just on the beach. I reckon it is for most of us, because that simple thing Jesus said, about loving your neighbour as yourself, is pretty much the hardest thing of all.
But, if I ever want a happy holiday, a happy life, it’s worth trying; perhaps starting with my own family, with whom I am often the most grumpy and antisocial of all, and working outwards from there. Once I crack that, maybe I’ll be better prepared for the naked Frisbees.
This is my beach. Please never go there.