The tide turned

A couple of years ago, a rescue operation was recorded at a lifeboat station in Poole, Dorset. ‘The boat was launched at 13.35p.m. following a call that a man and two children were stranded on rocks in the vicinity of Lulworth Cove. The wind was south-south-west force three. Visibility good. We reached the scene at 13.45p.m. The man and two children — one boy, one girl, both under five — were taken off the rocks and landed at an adjacent cove into the care of a local coastguard mobile unit.’ The report concluded: ‘The man’s name and address were not obtained.’

I can now reveal that the man was myself. At about noon that day, I had dug a pit in the sand for my children to muck about in, while I sat reading a book. The cove, divided in two by a small rocky headland, is fairly inaccessible; you have to clamber down steep rocks to reach it.