The wind has dropped. The water in the harbour rocks itself, brooding on its delusions. The squinting sea birds look as if they believe they might just eat again. Those hoteliers who changed wives or husbands at the start of the off-season – hoteliers are always the most romantic and expectant inhabitants of any remote place – have changed back again and are freshening up their Vacancy notices. Autographed copies of this year’s print run of Lionel Turnbull’s pamphlet (Lance Tourney is, of course, a pen-name) have started to appear in the post office and the village stores, and Lionel himself has begun those naked ritualistic swims which will continue every morning now until the Atlantic freezes over again. And already the first serious walkers of the season have arrived in their fetishistic boots and with their Ordnance Survey maps in protective plastic packets tied around their necks like bibs.

I meet them in the early morning during my penitential walks along the harbour walls or out on the cliff paths, and although they all nod me a bracing greeting or wave their blackthorn sticks, I can see that I am an extraneity and a blemish for them. In my long sleek-piled fur coat (resembling ocelot and bought on an Austin Reed charge account) and my Bally slip-on snakeskin shoes decorated, rather tastefully I’ve always thought, with a delicate gold chain and having the added advantage of slightly built-up heels, I am not what they have taken a week off work and kissed goodbye to their children and strapped methane stoves to their backs to find. At a stroke I domesticate the cliffs for them. Many of them, I fancy, will spend the rest of the day in a pet, not even noticing the wild sea below; fearing that at the next precipitous turn of the path, beneath the overhanging crags, above the foaming waterfall, they will come upon more like me, wearing jewels and stoles, contradicting one another in broken accents, and picnicking on smoked salmon sandwiches from the boot of a white Daimler. That’s the extent to which I have blotted their landscape.

But if my being here is a disagreeable shock to them, imagine what it is to me!

I have just been sitting on the rocks watching a group of schoolgirls watching Lionel Turnbull preparing for a swim. Whether Lionel saw the schoolgirls or whether the schoolgirls saw me it is impossible to say. We were all, in our own ways, separately engrossed. With the exception of a neat square rug of hair on his chest and back Lionel is a smooth man. Bobbing about in the water he is indistinguishable from the brown seals he has befriended. Anyone familiar with rustic persiflage will be able to imagine the sorts of jokes that circulate about Lionel and his relations with those seals. For all the influx of summer tourists this is still essentially a farming community – there isn’t anything that farmers find improbable.