The night before my eighteenth birthday I stood on the beach in Frinton, feet dipped in the surf at the edge of the North Sea. It was a warm evening in early July and the dusk was slowly deepening. Save for the gulls I was entirely alone. I felt a profound peace.
But finding myself about to teeter from childhood to adulthood who wanted peace? Not me. I reflected that far too much of my youth had been spent being very sensible. This moment called for a gesture. Something liberating. Something that tore up my childish reflex obedience and sent it fluttering away on the offshore breeze.
What was called for was a streak. It was going to be a very Moobsian streak. There was absolutely no-one around to see me and it was nearly pitch dark but if I was going to be reckless I wanted to set about it in a sensible way.
I took off my clothes and stacked them neatly by the seawall and then walked, shivering slightly, back to the water’s edge. I toyed with shouting “woohoo” but it seemed somehow undignified. Less dignified even than shrivelling away in the increasingly stiff breeze. I turned to face the South and jogging away from my starting point began my first streak.
Several things had not occurred to me. The first was that every 10 yards or so was a barnacle-covered groyne that I was going to have to clamber over without undue damage to my own groin. The interval was just enough to allow you to build to a sprint before having immediately to stop again in order to climb, ooing, ahing and ouching over the great slime-covered planks from which each groyne was constructed.
The second thing that might have occurred to me is that growing up on the English Coast does not leave you with the deep mahogany tan of David Hasselhof and his life-saving workmates. Dark though it was, my pasty white physique was glowing like a harvest moon. I should not, therefore, have been quite so surprised to hear a voice say: “What the heck is that? Is there someone down there do you think?”
Instinctively I froze and then began to squat so as to make myself as small as possible. About 50 yards away, up on the concrete seawall, were the silhouettes of two men.Â
“Maybe it’s a seal”.
I decided to wait till they walked on. I kept my breathing shallow and tried to be quiet. After 5 minutes or so, they apparently lost interest. They did not, however, move on. Instead, they began to set themselves up for a night of fishing. My thighs were now beginning to cramp and it was dawning on me that I could not stay there forever not least, as my increasingly wet ankles were telling me, because the tide was coming in. Still in a squat I tried to shuffle backwards up the beach, pausing every time the fishermen made a noise. I made good progress and after just 5 minutes I had moved as many yards and the saltwater was half way up my shins.
I decided to make a dash for it; stood up, turned and ran. In order to move more quickly I ran up towards the seawall a little so that the rake of the beach meant the groynes seemed lower and I stood a chance of hurdling them. The third thing that might have occurred to me is that at the top of the beach, sand gave way to shingle. This meant three things: First, my progress slowed spectacularly as the shingle shifted under every despairing step. Second, it was extraordinarlily noisy, rousing the startled fishermen. Thirdly, it was very painful on my feet. At the first groyne I launched myself about 3 inches into the air from the unstable platform of the pebbles and cracked my knee on a wooden support post. “Ow!” I shouted, remembering to try and make it sound like a seal.
The fourth thing that should have occurred to me was that I really should have been counting how many groynes I had gone over on my way down the beach as that would have been a great help in assisting me find my clothes which were now, I realised, lost in the darkness.
