It’s early evening. I’m nine or ten. I’m playing with Forget-Me-Not on a sandy beach somewhere on the English coast. Sand is stuck to our sun-lotioned skin. We have matching white hats. She is five or six and dancing, spinning, splashing, throwing her hat in the air and catching it and not catching it. Her hair is strawberry blonde, but the soft evening light is picking out more of the strawberry than the blonde. I don’t know if this beach is real or not, or a mixture of truth and fiction, of beaches we’ve been to and not been to or maybe just real ones set aside for the future. This is one of many holidays our families spend together. Sometimes our parents are out of eyeshot but within earshot, other times within eyeshot and out of earshot. Never neither. Always either/or. But where are they now? It’s a question we don’t ask. We are mesmerised by the tide. Splashing ankle-deep, shin-deep, knee-deep. We chase it and get chased by it. We are lost in play