The Beach

This framed photograph is hung in a prominent position in what is currently our 'snug' but which started off as an office. If my memory serves me right, it was once a calendar, I think in our Kilchoan days, and is now rather faded, yet it has survived the various recent moves and efforts to downsize simply because, to me, it represents a memory and a dream and an ideal, a perfect beach in a perfect climate with no other humans around to spoil it.

It's a memory because these were the sort of beaches we enjoyed as children growing up in Dar-es-Salaam and Mombasa, long before the invention of mass tourism ruined so many of them. The boy in the photograph is Tony, a good friend from those far-off days, and I think the beach is Whitesands, to the north of Mombasa.

In our various travels, Mrs MW and I have fortunate enough to find and walk similar beaches, ones which haven't been spoilt yet, both in the Caribbean and East Africa - picture is of our daughter Elizabeth at Long Bay on the east coast of Jamaica. I'm so pleased we did seize the windows of opportunity to make those journeys as I think the dream of seeing one again is fading - our age and our increasing senility preclude any further such adventures.

So I am left with the photographs and the memories they help to preserve - and thank God I have them, for when the sun does come out here, and I sit in the back garden in its welcome warmth, it is the memories of those glorious beaches that play through my mind.