BATTLE FOR BEACH 8

Never sure how to take being trained. I’m just not comfortable around people whose sole purpose is to know more about something than I do. It makes me nervous. I guess I’m just out of practice. I think the last person who taught me something useful was my driving instructor. Everything since then - largely useless - has been picked up through trial and error. Mainly error. So it feels quite novel to be in a small boat in the middle of a harbour being shown how to make it go and, more importantly, stop, without killing everyone involved. 

We’ve hired a Yellow Boat for the day on the promise of accessing one of twelve Beautiful and Secluded Beaches just up the coast. Beaches that no one without a boat, or hooves, can reach. But first I - and my fellow trainee, a wiry cockney with a nicotine croak and scarlet polo shirt - need to learn the ropes.

I don’t much like our teacher. If Ben Affleck was asked to play a Greek sleazeball this is probably how he'd do it. I don’t think he likes me either. I suspect he’d just as soon drop me to the bottom of the harbour in concrete flip-flops as teach me how to use his boat. 

Anyway, unlike my co-trainee, I have prior boating experience. Which is why I’ve not bothered looking at the video before we came, and he has. We’re shown how to moor the thing off a Beautiful and Secluded Beach. I ask what happens if the anchor gets stuck. Scarlett lets slip that the video covered that and sends his eyes briefly skyward. Point made. He gets to drive the boat back to shore, I don’t. I take this as our mentor acknowledging my innate nautical aptitude. Or possibly he wants me dead.

GREEK LOAF

Our luxury villa has been laid waste, pulverised into little more than a pile of gravel on an arid hillside. Either that or the sat nav got it wrong.

"Ring the number."

"I’ve tried, it doesn’t work. Just goes to beeps."

Despite our best efforts we’re both thinking the unthinkable. That we’ve been taken in by people who dupe people far less intelligent than us. That we might have to go on the telly and sit side by side holding hands to relate our sad and tragic tale for the amusement and edification of people to whom this kind of thing never happens. People like us.

Nearby a goat bleats insensitively as if nothing’s happened.

"What do the directions say?"

"Turn left before the Shell garage." 

But this doesn’t feel like the kind of place you’re going to find one of those. In fact it feels like we're the first motor vehicle ever to pass this way. Other than the one that brought the gravel.