A healthy holiday

30th August 2024

We’re in the South of France. August holiday. Les Grande Vacance. Gently rippling crystal blue sea, soft sand beneath us. This morning, the sun has scattered a large bucket of silver sprinkles from the horizon to the shore.

Where the sea meets the sand, there is a crystal froth of gentle bubbles as if someone is adding tonic to an exotic gin. The sand on the beach is clear, just a few tiny pebbly speckles and cup-sized circular imprints where swimmers have likely rested their cocktails or coffee cups before jumping in for their morning swim.

A silhouette of a fishing boat moves gently across the horizon as gulls swoop overhead clearly also enjoying the blue sky. There’s nothing not to like and we are grateful. Repeatedly, given last week’s winds.

The cosy beach temperature is sixteen degrees, perhaps the first clue as to the location of this particular part of the southern French coast. It’s eight am and it’s always refreshing to have cool air from the north blown onto your face.

Water temperature is around eighteen degrees — what a delight. Not too warm and smothering but a refreshing health-giving cool. In the other St Tropez, it’s apparently 27.8 degrees, who’d want that (no one wants to swim in a bath)? Too hot by anyone’s measure.

Eighteen degrees is the kind of temperature that boosts immunity (or so we’ve read) refreshing sore limbs, washing away the capacity even to catch a virus. A temperature after which you will be sure not only to live longer but feel it. You’re not so hot that you’d be tempted to cool down with an ice cream. Eighteen is clearly healthier.

We’re forty minutes before the first full high tide, it means that we’re swimming at an ideal depth, fully supported by healing waters yet, dip toes down in the manner of a ballet dancer en pointe and in all likelihood, you’ll touch the bottom. Safe and secure swimming, just a small amount of pull to the south.

The tourists seem mostly to have gone now. Unusual for the South of France, especially during August, not so strange in rural east Suffolk just before the start of term.

We’re enjoying the sunny morning as happily as if we were further south. It’s idyllic, until the odd moment reminding us that we’re not the only ones in the sea.

A happy morning chat will be abruptly interrupted by a loud ‘ew’ and the person you’ve been speaking to immediately breaks into a fast doggy paddle and heads off somewhere else, or frantically throws their arms back and forth in a manner that makes it impossible to continue the conversation.

Moon jellyfish love our warm water and sunny seas. They litter the sand at the moment, see-through roundels about the dimensions of a coffee cup, some fresh and juicy, others looking dried out, a clear sign that they’ve been there since the last tide.

There’s always a temptation to feel sorry for the ones that have been stranded on the sand. The thing is, they have no central nervous system, blood, brain or heart and really don’t feel a thing. When they get covered again by the next tide, they’ll get plumped out and head on their way, floating around for plankton.

Apparently, their diameter ranges from five to forty centimetres. It’s clearly the little ones that end up on the beach. Touch something with your hand or foot in the sea and it can feel like the mass of a small walrus. Ew.

There is currently no indication that we are about to be overrun with superyachts.

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