A new footpath from the village down to the beach opened earlier this year to a great fanfare. It was cut through virgin woodland using JCBs and furnished with stout wooden National Trust gates, fences and handrails. At one point the path is lined with gigantic exotic plants, escapees from the ‘lost’ tropical garden of a long-since demolished old cliff-top house. What they are God only knows, but they are thriving magnificently beneath the shelter of the cliff. ‘It’s like going for a walk in bloody Africa,’ observed reactionary old Grandad to Oscar as we trotted down this path for the first time the other day. One of these triffids was over seven feet tall; the tip bowed over by the weight of its buds.
Oscar and I have been playing football every day. We’ve been working on our heading. As well as the ball, we’ve been heading anything at or just above head height, including low-hanging apples, naked light bulbs, lampshades, wasps and small items of clothing hanging on the washing line. Now Oscar invited me to take a running jump and head the drooping tip of this weird plant, which I did, rising like a salmon and connecting with a flick worthy of Alan Gilzean in his pomp.
The new path emerged from the woods and joined the old one, originally a coach road, for its final gentle decline down to the beach car park, where my father used to work as a car-park attendant. The far end of the beach is a naturist beach by tradition and many of his regular customers were fanatical nudists. Not once can I remember seeing my father naked; very rarely was he seen even without a jacket and tie.
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