On the Beach
The unicorn bites the dust
The joys of being on holiday! The excitement of discovering the Airbnb (complete with coffee filters and butter knife); the thrill of using a Waitrose carrier bag in a French supermarché; the delight of not knowing anyone and therefore not needing to converse politely with anybody at all.
Settling into our holiday home, I unpacked everything apart from my running kit (who was I kidding?) while the children ran extensive tests on the TV remotes. My husband investigated the kitchen to check which basics would need collecting from the supermarché later. We had brought a few essentials to France with us, including unwaxed lemons and French garlic - both of which had travelled well (although the voyaging hummus was a sorry sight).
As a family, we made a conscious decision to do our bit for the environment whilst on holiday. Rather than consume airbnb utilities, we opted to dine in local restaurants. Absolutely buzzing from this green gesture, we upped our game by deciding to avoid taking the car to visit museums, art galleries and churches. Instead, at great personal sacrifice, we would spend every, single day on the beach.
So there we were, in the shade of our Aldi [don’t start] sun-shelter, complete with cool box, old towels, beach hats, water bottles and a box of fast-acting grass seed which had been left in the bottom of the bag by accident.
Around us there were individuals reading, scrolling and resting, couples in love, couples who couldn’t care less, groups of friends sharing bags of crisps, and families with various generations lined up next to each other on faded, patterned towels.
It’s a precious time, useful for teaching the children valuable life hacks such as when you see someone who has spent most of the day on the sand suddenly enter the sea and squat at waist-height, it’s best not to swim in that area for a short while.
Only on the beach do you congratulate a child for making a pile of sand and throwing water around it. If they expect praise for that at home, you’d probably add them to the waiting list for a child psychologist.
There is a short but marked chapter of everyone’s lives when one makes an effort to look attractive or elegant on a beach. Fortunately that silliness no longer concerned most of the crowd here today. Such a relief, having spent far too many years trying to get changed by precariously standing on one leg whilst holding up a damp, sandy towel as a makeshift cubicle.
A Belgian couple ventured towards us, assuming it would be easy to install their beach umbrella because we had managed to set up the sun-shelter. The poor man got increasingly frustrated as he attempted to screw the parasol base into impenetrable sand. In truth, the ground was also too hard for us to secure our tent using the plastic tent-keep-downy bits, so our solution was for me to sit inside and serve as a dead weight to stop it blowing away. It is nice to be useful sometimes.
There was quite a mix on this beach. There are those who intentionally turn lobster-red in the hope of a faint olive-glow once the burns have receded, and others who remain fully-dressed and glue themselves to the parasol pole. Spread evenly across the sand were the beach veterans, who had been sunning themselves since March and were now various shades of leather.
One family seemed rather too organised, with an alarm clock sounding for lunchtime, at which point they all sat down and ate home-made salads with actual cutlery. In a nearby play area, sisters wearing identical caps ran and climbed, although the little one got cheesed off with the older one who kept telling her how to do everything. Every ten minutes, fathers awkwardly clambered up the rope tipi to rescue children who had gone too high (again), eventually managing to deflect the children’s attention with phone-time or a donut.
Unbelievably we were unable to buy ice-lollies directly from a beach kiosk! After pointing at the board, repeatedly saying bonjour and waving foreign money in the air, the vendor explained that customers needed to download an app, sign-up online (entering name, DoB, contact details, blood type and favourite Beatle), select the correct location (France?) then proceed to the order page only to find they were out of stock. Promptly realising that life was too short for that kind of rubbish, we postponed the ice cream rendez-vous until later on.
The lifeguards also left a lot to be desired (though my standards were impossibly high, having grown up watching ‘Baywatch’). These adolescents strutted about in bright yellow t-shirts and red shorts and spent the afternoon playing catch with water bottles. The lifeguards seemed so young that I hoped someone was keeping an eye on them. At 6pm on the dot, the yellow flags were yanked up and unceremoniously tossed into their hut (which also served as a bikini sales outlet and bike puncture repair station) and the lifeguards disappeared. Perhaps it was bedtime.
Many things are permissible on a beach which you would never normally do in a non-beach situation. Where else would you take off your clothes among strangers, walk around in stringy pants, inflate a unicorn and intermittently rub cream all over your body? Where else would it be deemed socially acceptable to join a group of friends, spread lotion on the backs of people you don’t know very well and socialise by napping next to one another?
And of course, there is the infamous French beach tradition whereby it is perfectly acceptable for ladies to go a little Venus de Milo (with arms). The topless women around us made it look so natural, and I wondered: could I man-up and join their club? Admiring their confidence and liberty, and knowing that this might unlock the possibility of my truly becoming French, I mulled it over with my husband. ‘What would I do if I saw someone we knew? Do we have enough sun cream?’ He was surprisingly supportive, reassuring me that - at my age - such an act would arouse remarkably little interest.
About ten metres away, there was a naturiste French mother who looked so at ease. Naming her Claire Delalune, I imagined that she and I could become best friends (bosom buddies, as it were) and that this was the way to clinch it. I therefore bit the bullet and threw my cares to the warm wind, embracing the newest dimension of my Frenchness. After all, ‘when in Rome’ etc.
Later and still enjoying my newfound beach persona, the wind picked up. Feeling nervous about the unsecured sun-shelter, I spread my weight evenly over the floor mat à la starfish, feigning a sunbathing posture. I had visions of the shelter being lifted into the air and flying away with me inside: “Toto, we’re not in the South of France anymore”. Would things have been different if Dorothy Gale had been called Dorothy Calm-Breeze? Either way, at least she was dressed.
The wind died down and it felt time to pack-up and get the long-awaited ice cream - a message I needed to signal to my family as they were still in the water. At first I tried waving but they just waved back. Not wishing to shout, I then stood up and mimed eating a big ice cream. My husband was quite far away, so my gestures were as obvious as possible. To my horror, Claire Delalune’s fifteen-year old son (who happened to be standing between me and the sea), thought I was propositioning him and reported me to his mother. My new best friend lost no time in summoning a police officer! Oh, Claire Delalune, how could you? Before you could say Champs Élysées, I was on the receiving end of an official dressing down whilst in a state of undress.
A while later, after Monsieur Dubosc - a firm gendarme with impeccable English - had lent me a high-vis vest and taught me some family-friendly hand gestures, I emerged from my temporary confinement within the lifeguard hut to find my family outside eating ice cream. The children had been allowed an extra scoop as Mummy was having a long chat with the nice French man. There were no charges for indecent exposure or propositioning a minor because it was aper’o’clock and no one could be bothered with the paperwork.
Monsieur Dubosc gave stickers to the children for being good, and instructed a colleague to remove the police tape from the perimeter of our sun-shed.
All tent putter-uppers dread the end of a beach day, when - in front of everyone - they must battle the wind in order to fold up the tent and persuade it back into the shoebox it came in. Luckily, Monsieur Dubosc was a dab hand with a sun-shelter and helped my husband put it away as they discussed my misdemeanours.
Claire Delalune had already left, and others were packing up too. There was another brief drama when a man nearby bent over and started making strange sounds, clutching his middle as if in pain, though it soon became apparent that he was deflating a dinosaur. The Organised Family children were folding everything into triangles, as the mother wiped clean the frisbee before putting it in their special frisbee bag.
For the record, before getting into trouble, I did indeed go in the water. This took much effort because I am a spa-person (not a beach-person), and find it irksome when people tell me things that I don’t like are good for me, like sea-swimming, dark chocolate or cardio. Nonetheless, I spent 20 minutes swimming and perfecting my back-to-the-beach-stroke. I also took a turn with the inflatable unicorn but was quickly admonished by the children for inadvertently putting excessive pressure on its head (though at least we now know why they became extinct).
*Gendarme: the French have both police officers and the gendarmerie. The first is a civil force and the gendarmerie are a military force (although it was overkill calling in the military to handle my minor topless ice cream offence).