Overdose on beauty

Sun-drenched beaches are drawing car loads of people out of the city today like a hot bread poultice draws poisonous pus from an infected wound, or like a jar of sweet, stale beer draws slugs from a vegetable garden. The beaches in Ireland will be crawling with people, most of them with lily white skin that is unprotected from the sun, skin that will be lobster red after a few hours. Music will be blasted into the atmosphere from competing boom boxes and life guards will strut and pose, facing into the breeze so that their permed and bleached manes will sit just so and wow the collection of thirteen year girls gathered to ogle them, even though the girls don’t realise that’s what they’re doing. I’ll resist the lure of yellow sunshine and limpid waters. It’s into the forest that I’ll repair this afternoon, to walk along winding trails in sparse company; to bathe my eyes in the wet, green balm given off by a dense undergrowth of ferns. The sun will forget me, will caress only the topmost canopy of leaves while I luxuriate beside streams and be serenaded by small waterfalls. It’s into green, shaded pools that I’ll plunge, in which no-one’s dog will have defecated, and no child will have peed. A mossy rock will be my dinner table rather than a sandy blanket. When my thirst has been slaked and my hunger assuaged I’ll lie back and sleep a while, confident that no football will land upon my dormant brow, that no prankster will have piled two mounds of sand upon my chest to make me look like a woman. There will be no need for alcohol or other mood-altering fixes in the forest. It’s not euphoria or inhibition that I’ll seek but joy, pure unadulterated contentment, a deep-seated satisfaction that comes from some place beyond myself and comes only when I take myself aside from all the yahooery of the beach, and, in solitude, move pass the brutal, cosmic “why?” to swim in the childlike confidence of the blissful, accepting “because”.