Pedn Vounder beach is as damn near the end of Western Europe as you can get. It’s pronounced Pedny Vander, just so you know. From its sands you can see the vapour trails of the trans-Atlantic flights, now at full cruising height, as they leave UK airspace, next stop, the New World. The beach is the last and biggest of a chain of three: the crowded and popular Porthcurno beach with its vast car park, Telegraph Museum and Minack Theatre carved out of the rock. There’s the middle crescent of sand, reachable by foot and exposed to view only at low tide but otherwise hidden under water and with no roads to it. Then there is Pedn Vounder itself. Locals use this last one. Apart from being one of the most spectacular beaches in the world, it is also home to a colony of nudists. These perma-bronzed, turtle skinned naturists frequent one part of the beach. They are primarily a wild haired crowd of mingled ages – some grey haired and wind tousled, some lithe bodied and younger. A couple like to indulge in a bit of very public naked yoga, which is not an overly attractive sight, being, in the main, more about showing off bodies and bits rather than being of any spiritual significance. The nudist throng are always on the beach when I arrive and still on it when I leave. They seem to live, and presumably love, on this beach. I have only once not seen them when I have been on Pedn (it’s known by its shortened name). I once camped overnight and we had the entire place to ourselves.
When I lived in Cornwall, Pedn Vounder was my office. If you calculate my life in numbers during the years we lived in Cornwall, you will see why. In the years between 2006 and 2013, when I left to go and live in Brighton, I ran my consulting business, Caffeine, from Penzance. We jokingly described it as ‘Caffeine West Coast’, as if we were a business with a base in California. Being in business worldwide when you are based a six hour train journey from London – from where my business world started (there was no real business to be had in Cornwall itself) – means I travelled a lot. A lot a lot. My commute was the Cornish Riviera Night Train, a crawling, quaint service between Penzance and Paddington station which covers the 306 miles between 10pm and 0530am every night except Saturday. It chugs along, occasionally breaking down, through fair weather and foul, delivering people like me from Truro, Bodmin, Plymouth and Exeter ‘up the line’ (as the Cornish refer to anywhere beyond the county’s border). On this train, I travelled most weeks, clocking up the equivalent distance of going around the world five and a half times. That’s some 600 journeys or 137,500 miles. And that’s before I set off for anywhere else – that was just to get to Heathrow airport.
From my office on the beach, I could look up and see but not hear all the planes as they departed UK airspace for destinations all over the world. And when I was on that beach, it meant that I was at home – either just returned from a mega-journey overseas and recuperating (decompressing as I call it) or storing up sunshine before embarking on another marathon. So looking up, I would always say a muttered prayer to thank God I wasn’t on that plane.
I lived on planes. My passport from those days is a tapestry of stamps and visas. Cambodia, Turkey, multiple USA entry stamps, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, China, Singapore, Japan, Thailand. The long haul trips were usually 10-21 days, often two or three centres, running courses and workshops and training programmes. In the 2006-2013 period, I clocked up some 400,000 air miles, or another 15 times around the world. No wonder I needed beach r’n’r.
And when I got home, I crashed, often for two or three days. The jet lag, for one thing. The exhaustion for another – each gig demanded a lot. When you are running workshops or making speeches at conferences back to back it takes a lot out of you. You are on your feet all day. You are also thinking on your feet all day, too. You are giving huge quantities of energy all day to keep the workshop lively and the audience stimulated. And you are often working at night to be at dinners or planning the next day or writing the next proposal to keep the plane in the air. So landing at Heathrow and then schlepping back on the train all the way to Penzance was often a 20 hour journey.
Once home, the beach beckoned. And it was always Pedn. Although I never joined the intimate beach cabal that was the nudist colony, I did strip off. The sand was warm, the soundtrack was waves and gull song and the days I went were always hot – this beach doesn’t do for dour weather. Treen, the nearest village, is two miles away and that’s where you park your car, so you need to travel light: a backpack, shorts, shirt and shoes. Easy to carry, easy to take off. The walk is down a track and eventually you dog leg left at the big rock formation and walk down the side of the cliffs. The last part is a scramble over rocks and a short slide down the rock face on to the beach. It’s not lazy-friendly, which is why it doesn’t get crowded – the tourists stay stuck in Porthcurno.
The tidal reach isn’t huge but that’s a bonus for when the tide is out and the beach is stretched before you, there are ankle deep lagoons that get left by the sea and you can walk from one end of the beach to the other. I occasionally promenaded to the far rocks naked. It is liberating to wander and feel the breeze. And it feels surreal to bid good morning to people as you pass each other’s gaze. It gives you strength when you are wearing only a smile. “I have nothing to hide” it says. “Here I am, and I am fearless.” Swimming is also a joy and as you emerge from the water in the warm sunlight and back across the sands to your towel, you feel renewed.
Looking up and seeing the plane 35,000 feet above me, imagining myself looking down from the window seat at the last of the land disappearing from sight, I feel smug. All that hard work, all that hard travel, affords me the opportunity to do this. My phone goes. It is a client. She can hear the gull cries and says it sounds beautiful. “You should see it”, I say. I tell her I am on the beach. “Do you want me to call back later?” she asks. “No, no. It’s fine. I work from here all the time”. This is part of the image I like to create in my clients’ minds because people equate beaches with leisure and people who spend lots of time on beaches must be either very lazy or very successful. Most people fill in the gap with the latter rationale. I do not disabuse them of this conclusion. It helps me keep my prices high.
I am naked and my eyes are closed with my face turned to the sun. I picture my client in her stuffy City office surrounded by computer terminals and people in suits. I plug in my earphones, give a little wave to the aeroplane above and think God, how lucky I am.