But it’s OK! Andrew has got the engine going again! He presses the accelerator and does a victory lap of the water, followed by Fin and Reuben, getting even more dangerously close to the beach than before. Because as long as he tells himself that’s what it is, it’s real, in his head, victory. That mouthy woman and her hippie friends haven’t won. He has. Because here he is showing them the way to live: that sitting on a beach reading a book, or doing your stupid yoga, or eating your stupid organic packed lunch, is for losers. Life is about making money and using it to find a penis that is more powerful than your own. And he is sure – even though his throat, and all the bits of his body it leads down to, are even drier now – everyone will know that, and be in no doubt of his victory, as he motors away to another cove, followed by those he has spawned, and passed on his wisdom and prowess to.

The calm that redescends after that is powerful. At the other end of the beach, Hollie resumes thwacking a tennis ball back and forth with Annie, and Joe resumes watching her, and wondering why she didn’t like the poem his anonymous Internet self sent her. People slip back into their delicious salty sleeps. Swimmers swim in a less nervous way. Dogs are congratulated for further minor acts of restraint. There is a slight sense that Jennifer Tomasovich the occupational therapist has given the beach the therapy it needed.

But I am not satisfied.

You will have noticed I sided with the peace-loving fraternity in this situation. The ‘hippies’ as Andrew Bannister thought of them, even though that description would only truly fit a few of them. The people not forcing their lives on anyone else. I generally do take that side. I am on the side of the land (well, obviously), the side of freedom, the side of unpolluted sound of waves and spiteless laughter. But am I a hippie myself? No. I resist such simple boxes. But more than that, I am too angry. You cannot be me, and see all I have seen, feel all I have felt, and not be.

‘Oh, so you’re a nihilist then, are you?’ is what you’re thinking. And you’d be wrong there too. I am not a nihilist, a communist, a socialist, an anarchist, a libertarian, a liberal, a conservative, an anything. I am me, with all of what has made me, with all of what has soaked me, and with all of that you cannot be a label.