The Beach

A little under the weather this morning, owing to unwooded chardonnay. Would wooded have been better? Who knows? Anyway, after taking Sara to work (she was, as usual, completely unaffected), I realised that all the tasks I’d planned for the day could be easily postponed until I was feeling better and, remembering all those mornings when I was feeling rough and dragged myself into the newsroom for a mammoth shift, I went for a walk on Diggers Beach, at the end of our road.

It’s never crowded, but, as this is Australia, there’s always someone exercising and at 8.45am I joined two runners, two walkers, looking determined but relaxed, and three surfers, bobbing gently up and down on a practically flat sea. I don’t think they had an hope of catching a wave; they were just glad to be there. Even though this is winter, the sun was blazing, the temperature was just topping twenty degrees, with a fresh breeze to remind me that the seasons change here as well.

In fact, the nearest the beach ever comes to being crowded is early on summer mornings, and I mean early, before six o’clock, when people like to get their exercise in before the heat of the day and, if they’re sharp, can also fit in a well-earned café breakfast before work. In fact, if you’re running, you can get quite out of breath exchanging greetings both with people you know and people you don’t. I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re not just saying “hi”. We’re actually saying: “Hello. Isn’t this wonderful? I feel so lucky to be here under this blue sky, my bare feet in the sand, and the warm sun just loitering above the horizon. I’m so glad to be here and I can see you are too. There‘s no place I‘d rather be, not even in bed.”

So there’s a cast of regulars, though not all appear first thing in the morning. Sara’s brother-in-law, Colin, strides along the beach and over the headland before and after work most days, recently listening to his French lessons on his MP3 player in preparation for the family holiday. As I discovered, he can’t always hear you and he concentrates very hard, so greetings are sometimes apparently met with muttered phrases in French. Lucky I know him. Fisherman trawl the water’s edge with bits of fish on a string trying to tempt worms to the surface for bait. The mysterious Asian woman wanders back and fore, so shrouded against the sun by her huge hat and scarf that I have only had a glimpse of her face. Brazen men stride toward the rocks that lead to Little Diggers, which has become something of a nudist beach, even at 6am as I discovered on one of my first early-morning runs.

The surfers are always there, even if only standing on the boardwalk that leads from the car park, contemplating whether it’s worth getting wet and usually deciding it is, however calm the sea, if only for the pleasure of chatting with the others while waiting, optimistically, for a wave. Some days, though, they get very good surf. And there’s the East Coast Surf School which holds daily lessons, sometimes for entire classes of school children, marking out its classroom on the sand with a couple of flags. I suspect surfing is on the curriculum.

Sara has a colleague, Sally, who periodically throws open the doors of their office and tells the world outside: “We live in paradise,” thus disturbing the travelling gentlemen trying to sleep amid the parrot droppings in the park outside. And it was on one of those sunny, big-surf days during the school holidays when the sea, the sand, the bush and the sky were all sparkling, that I fully realised she was right. There were more people than usual on the beach, the numbers swelled by seasonal visitors to the local resort. I was making my way out through the surf when a very large, blue, slowly-curving wave rushed up. I was at the bottom and, many, many feet above me, was another swimmer. I dived, he plummeted and we met somewhere in the middle, both at the mercy of the wave. We emerged spitting water and smiling and ascertained we were both unhurt. Then he flung his arms wide, as if he were going to embrace me. I thought this was bit too friendly, even for Diggers, but what he wanted to do was to embrace the entire scene. Still breathless from our dunking by the wave, he stood there in the water and shouted: “This is just so good, so good.” He was on holiday, it turned out, and having the time of his life. And reminding me that I shouldn’t take it for granted.