But now they are on the shingle, and there is not a hint of Internet or phone reception and that other universe in which those messages were exchanged feels even more like one totally separate to this, with very few of the same rules or beliefs or social guidelines. The Internet is still two full years away from arriving at the beach so everyone is being a person. Nine people are asleep and, of those, seven will remember this sleep, with the sound of the waves in the background, as their most delicious sleep of the summer. Near the cliffs, someone has left a packet of chalk sticks, and on the rocks somebody has chalked the message ‘PHUCK “SOCIETY” MAKE YOUR OWN RULES’. Just left of that somebody else has chalked a naked male body from the shoulders down. The naked male body’s penis is standing to attention. If we are talking purely in terms of how it relates to the body it is attached to, the penis is slightly bigger than the Cerne Abbas Giant’s. In front of it a woman called Sue is praising a Schnauzer for leaving a crab to just get on and exist as a crab. But it is not a beach day without problems. Three men have just arrived on jet skis, bludgeoning every pleasant noise the day had to offer, and are riding closer and closer to the people in the water. Jennifer Tomasovich, an occupational therapist from Lostwithiel, has been watching the jet skiers and has now marched down to the shore and is shouting at them and trying to wave them away from the beach but they can’t hear her and, if they do see her hand gestures, it only seems to encourage them to continue to get closer and closer to the shore, buzzing in show-off circles on these machines that they have convinced themselves are their Cerne Abbas Giant-sized cocks (or maybe the cock of some other land form which is slightly bigger but doesn’t feel the need to be outlined in chalk). David Ludgate, who retired from running the big corporate optician in Exeter last year, has strolled down with his son Sam to join Jennifer, whom neither of them has ever met, on the tideline. ‘Go away!’ he shouts at the jet ski pricks.

‘Fuck off!’ Sam adds. ‘Nobody wants you here and nobody likes you.’

Now a bigger crowd is gathering, thirteen or fourteen people, most of whom have never previously met, all united by this common four-cylinder enemy. Three or four of them begin to throw pebbles in the direction of the jet skiers. The jet skiers stop, about twenty yards out from the shore, and switch off their engines.