Trust me

Beach - break nightmares

Trust me, I’ve been there

BY ZOE WILLIAMS

BEACH culture really passed me by when I was a kid. It passed me by when I was a student, too. But then I suppose it does for everybody – what kind of unnatural monster-child cares about getting a tan? What kind of student accrues enough money to go on holiday? This was, ahem, some time before budget airlines.

So I was 25 before I did a proper bucketand- spade-for-grown-ups holiday. It was an 18–30, to Ayia Napa. You heard a lot about 18–30s, even in them olden days, and they were meant to be solid, wall-to-wall debauchery, with barely enough time between hangover and alco-pop even to notice that you were staying near a beach. That wasn’t why I went on it, you understand. I went because it was cheap. But it was also strangely, almost eerily, peaceful. There were no boys on it at all. Four ex-squaddies were the tour guides, and they’d evidently been on some residential course to teach people how to shout very loudly in bars and then lose their passports (or maybe that training course is called the Army), yet all they had to contend with were these four demure, delicately beautiful 19-year-old girls from Luton. And, of course, me and my friend. But we didn’t really count, being exceptionally old for an 18–30s holiday, and also being complete beach novices.

Who knows how these four gorgeous girls had managed to get into that kind of shape? Possibly they’d been going to bikini boot camp for the whole of May, or more likely they were just born like that. But first, I want you to imagine a quartet of beach perfection, dressed in not matching, but complementary, H&M. At the start of the holiday, I suppose you’d say they were the colour of cocoa butter, but no way were they going to leave it at that. They tanned as if it were a job of work. They did not sit still for a second. They followed the sun round the beach using special tools (well, the power of sight, mainly), and when they weren’t assessing maximum ray-exposure, they were monitoring their body parts for tonal alteration with the tight-lipped critical exactitude of a Victorian foreman. They sunbathed unceasingly. And all the time, my friend and I were sitting 50 paces away from them, going “what are they doing now? Separating their toes for better inter-toe tanning? Shall we do that?”.

sight, mainly), and when they weren’t assessing maximum ray-exposure, they were monitoring their body parts for tonal alteration with the tight-lipped critical exactitude of a Victorian foreman. They sunbathed unceasingly. And all the time, my friend and I were sitting 50 paces away from them, going “what are they doing now? Separating their toes for better inter-toe tanning? Shall we do that?”.

There’s a lesson here, which I’m getting around to – next time you look at a beach professional with a glorious tan and think “I could do that”, stop. Think about it. Would you think that about a gymnast?