Beach 1: Ripple

So. Here they all were on their beach. Together again, a year to the day as always. Old university friends in the main, gathering to remember good times past but extracting every ounce of life from the present. They’d been meeting like this religiously for almost thirty years. An annual barometer check on the weathering of their lives. Sharing triumphs, commiserating woes. The ebb and flow of career leaps and tumbles, achievements public and private, divorces, health scares, and children (now no longer children, and no longer here for there was a whole world to explore, without the encumbrance of family).

As the sun sank into the sea, the group sat in a circle around their driftwood fire. All day there’d been wine and cider and barbecues and skinny dipping. Cool boxes opened and closed on repeat, foil parcels unwrapped and resealed, fermenting coleslaw, a solitary quarter-eaten banana steaming in the heat (why did someone always bring a bloody banana?) wet sand removed with towel-toe wedgies, sun lotion slapped on, then blasted off in seconds by the surf.

There had been laughter, sometimes manic, sometimes nervous. And there had been tears, which were to be expected. 

Any passing stranger walking Cornwall’s north coast path high above this hidden little cove would have heard them, and felt a strange pull to join. But Tintagel Castle beckoned ahead, and there was no marked route down. So after a few moments of searching and wondering, they would have walked on to their next pit stop, the promise of a pint of Tribute and a pasty quickly wiping the memory away.