They know all this because I tell them about my wave theory all the time and Mikey and Joey and Maeve give me the thumbs-up. It is a lovely thing to have the respect of your innocent children. I only hope that I still have a bit more time with Maeve. The years go so quickly. Fridays keep coming around and although this isn’t a bad thing in the sense that my working week is over it is, however, disconcerting the way time keeps moving on and it’s moving on too fast and I think about Johnny Cash and I think about freight trains and the fact that I know that Jenny has brought cigarettes to the beach – I can discern the compact shape of her twenty Camel Lights in the back pocket of her jeans. My heart falls. She turns to me and I touch her lips with my lips and then I look into the hazel of her eyes, eyes that could swallow you and I ask her not to smoke on the beach, not in front of the nude people and not in front of the children.

She looks at me as if I have lost my mind and I hold out my hand to her, Jenny, I say will you go on my count?

And as the seventh wave recedes my breath quickens and we dash over from our beach to the other side, to White Rock, and I want to sit down on the first flat piece of rock that you meet and I want to look up to the sky and I want to feel calmly the heat of the late morning sun. Instead I am faced with the prospect of Frisbee as Mikey and Joey race past me and strip down to their swimming shorts that are decorated with surfers and palm trees. I undress hurriedly and already they are throwing the Frisbee at me. It hits my ankles sharply and despite this I launch myself into the game and I am running around the compacted sand and the heat emanating from the sand feels absolutely glorious and we are so alive.

There’s still lots of heat left in the summer and there’s still lots of time left for swimming and that is what we must do, as a family. I play Frisbee with the boys for probably the guts of an hour but it feels less like that because I am having such a good time.