The scourge of the beach tent land grab

‘Ah,’ says my husband at the top of the cliff path at Overstrand, ‘it’s just like a Shirley Hughes illustration.’ There are sandcastles, wooden groynes, children and dogs running in and out of the waves.

Then his eye falls on the first land grab of the day. Three generations of the same family are hard at work constructing their citadel: popping up polyester tents to form a wide arc, shovelling shingle into the flaps to secure them, unfurling windbreaks across either end to mark the outer limits of their encampment.

We – like the family in a favourite Hughes picture book from my childhood, Lucy and Tom at the Seaside (1976) – have travelled with just ‘the picnic things and bathing bags and buckets and spades’. The seven-year-old brings the bodyboard he got for his birthday, which has been manacled to his leg ever since. And that’s it.

But we’re part of a dwindling breed.