It was the hippies, of course, (the mung beans, as they’re known up here), who had turned a section of Cable Beach into a nudist haven. But for some reason they weren’t in evidence when we walked along the sand later that day. The beach was as quiet as Johnny Chi Lane had been. One very large lady, browned all over and therefore not strictly speaking naked at all, rolled in the frothing surf like a dugong. And an exceedingly handsome and well-preserved couple, half-in and half-out of their clothes, half-in and half-out of the water, bobbed up and down and waited to see what we would do. ‘Well, I can’t really come up with any good reason why not,’ I said to Ros. I think she was surprised by this reply to a question she hadn’t asked. And I know she was surprised by the alacrity with which I shed my clothes and ran twinkling into the sea, partly because I was normally reluctant even to go as far as trunks, but more especially because I couldn’t swim.

In fact I had nothing more in mind than a brief frolic in the shallowest fringe of surf, and a bit of obliging bobbing to put the handsome, well-preserved couple at their ease. The surprise for my part was how much I enjoyed it. One minute I’d been a grave grown man who liked the feel of bitumen beneath his feet, the next I was a weightless water baby, snorting spume and spluttering and hallooing. Everything that naturists used to say in the 1950s, when the world was innocent, turned out to be true. Yes, I had been reconnected with my physical self. Yes, I did feel as one with the great elemental forces – sea, surf, sky and my salty privities in cosmic harmony. And yes, yes, yes, I was free, happy, natural, and unashamed. If I knew of one impediment to perfect bodily felicity it was only this: no one had invited us to join a game of volleyball.

As it happened, I was lucky. I might easily have had something more serious to complain about. We shouldn’t have been anywhere near that water. It swarmed with stingrays and box jellyfish and all the other usual malevolent inhabitants of boiling tropical oceans whose season for an uninhibited frolic of their own this was. Somehow we’d missed the notices warning us to keep out. When I realized how close I’d been to a terrible quietus I snapped double in a spasm of imaginative self-pity and didn’t straighten until teatime.