Maybe it’s just a touch of the sun and we’ve had so much to touch us lately.
But have you noticed how life turns full circle?
When I was young I splashed in the shallows, a fair headed child with an abdominal overhang. Then I began to swim and disport myself beyond the breakers, a daring young Adonis clutching my wooden surfboard catching the curling lip of the sea, and scattering the girls like beautiful flying fish.
Then my hair grew sparser and my swimming stamina dwindled.
Now, bald-headed and scarcely able to raise a ripple of interest in even a passing bikini, I am back In the shallows again, floating like an old liferaft from some wreck. And still with an abdominal overhang.
It was all brought home to me at a blistering beach on the holiday coast where I’d sought to float limp, massive and impassive a few centimetres about the shelly seabed. I have always been a floater rather than a propeller and this was one of my floating days
I was suddenly aware of five shadows—not sharks, silly, but something more menacing—children.
Aggressive, curious children. Intrigued but belligerent.
“You go back to the sea, big barrel” said the spokesperson, a mermaid in floral bathers and with a perpetually running nose. The shallows are for children.
“ Go, go, go,” they began shouting in that terribly frightening rhythm of childish gangs.
“Has come from the sea” asked a small boy,” or has it come from the land?”
“Never mind where it comes from” said Floral Pants, “it’s where we’re going to send it.”
“It could be a whale. We must be kind to whales and help them back to in deep water,” said a small environmentalist, heavily freckled but with a kindly appearance. “Look whale I’ll lead you back.”
“Anyway it’s not a whale, said Floral Pants. “Its tail is the wrong shape. If it was a whale we could melt it down and make oil for Eskimo lamps.”
She gave me a loose toothed leer that would have repelled a white pointer.
They began beating the water again. But I was too big for them
“Shall I tell you a story?” I said.
The monster is talking. Yes monster, tell your story.
“Once,” I said dreamily, “I was young with air golden hair and a bucket and spade and played happy in the shallows.”
“But as I got older people poured the bucket over me and drove me out of my depth. Somehow I couldn’t keep my head above water. Next moment I was on the rocks, the sea was full of sharks and even my family said I was as spineless as a jelly-fish.”
“I knew I wasn’t in the- swim so I came ashore to be left high and dry. Sometimes I feel like I am stranded partways, twixt the Devil and the deep blue sea.”
The applause could only be described as scattered.
“You’re nothing but a big, fat, wet old cry baby, said Floral Pants
Then the contemptuous quintet departed, perhaps to trample at couple of aunts or maybe to sack the kiosk.
Suddenly I saw a stem and waving figure on shore, a figure waving an authoritative beach towel and I knew that she wasn’t from Greenpeace.
“Are you staying in the water all day making an exhibition of yourself?” she asked. So I rose obediently. Even a sea monster knows when he’s licked.
But I thought about that bossy kid in the for al bathing suit and I told myself that one day she’d be a grandma with knitted knees and worrying sons-in-law, and she’d be in the shallows somewhere and youth would come to stare and question and get in her old, grey, wet hair.
Anyway, for a big, fat, wet old cry baby with an abdominal overhang, it was a comforting thought.
Max Fatchen