Hilary Fannin: A lockdown sex scene on my local beach

I’ve just realised that there are only 280 days remaining until the end of the year! This is not good news. Signs are that 2022 will be a sea of hedonism, awash with cocktail menus, over-enthusiastic fondue aficionados and unavoidable social interactions, meaning that there’s precious little time left to do anything useful with our remaining period of quasi-isolation.

I went for a walk on the beach yesterday and found myself marching my greasy parka through hordes of pale and frothy people gadding about under an unaccustomed sun. Hot and panicky under my unseasonal outerwear, I watched people divest themselves of their clothes and their memories of a woebegone winter and run into the freezing sea to dye their calves blue.

I dallied awhile under the circling seagulls and listened to the revellers yelp in shock. (Holy cow, Margaret, it’s hardly the Med!) I watched them run out again to congregate in shivering knots and warm up over crisp sandwiches and hipster beers, while anarchic sand-eating toddlers played at their frozen feet.

I haven't knitted anything, painted anything or planted anything. I haven't learned a language or a musical instrument

Nervy old misanthrope that I am, I eventually found a rock far from the goosepimpled throng and, given that society seems to be hurling itself against the buckling doors of the pandemic, sat down to think about all the things I’ve failed to achieve in this unprecedented era.

Hilary Fannin: The St Patrick’s Day parade taught me I was Irish

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Just remind yourself: ‘I’m a covetous cretin, but my generosity with gin is legendary!’

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Hilary Fannin: The wild night out my party jacket never had

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Hilary Fannin: Some strangers need a good slap with a mackerel

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I haven’t knitted anything, painted anything or planted anything. I haven’t learned a language or a musical instrument, or mastered any skill set that might be useful next time the sink overflows or the cat goes into hairball paroxysms on the ever-so-slightly moth-eaten rug.

On the upside, I’ve got very good at day-long snacking, procrastinating, paella-making, staring out the streaky window, dyeing my own hair and speaking on the telephone.

How, I pondered, will I answer my as-yet-unborn great-grandchildren when they gather around my hearth to say: “Hark, Granny Grey, why don’t you unglue your gums from your gin bottle for a moment and tell us what wondrous things you did with your time back in ye olde pandemic?”

“Why, darling Hydroxia and little Epidemi, I sat around on my increasingly jelly-like backside and, while crunching on great mouthfuls of non-organic pistachio nuts, thought long and hard about going on a fasting diet and also about the inherent difficulties of trying to write sex scenes in the modern novel.”

“Oh, do elucidate a little more, Granny, please!”

“Well, children, when a writer, who is also a woman, writes about sex, it can sometimes be interpreted as confessional or autobiographical, whereas when a writer, of any gender or none, describes cutting up a strangled corpse with a breadknife and disposing of the body parts with the help of the cat lit and a Nutribullet, it’s just plain old imaginative thinking.”

“What’s a Nutribullet, Granny?”

“Nothing for you to worry your little cone-shaped, noseless heads about, dears.”

The woman gazed into his eyes – eyes blue and fathomless, deep as the deepest, deeply deep sea that was roaring in her shell-likes

Walking back home along the beach, determined to move on once and for all from pandemic ennui and to tackle my writerly squeamishness, I espied a couple who, not even having made it as far as the dunes and the bit of privacy they might afford, were allowing spring fever go straight to their noggins.

Arching her delicate back, the hot sand underneath her mimicking the burning need in her loins, the woman gazed into his eyes – eyes blue and fathomless, deep as the deepest, deeply deep sea that was roaring in her shell-likes.

“We can get chips after,” he croaked, overcome with an animal passion more suited to a majestic lion or a three-legged greyhound with the scent of a plastic hare in its nostrils.

“Mind my balayage,” she whispered into his Dior Sauvage balm-scented neck, the tendons of which were strained with the effort of controlling his desire.

“What’s a balayage?” he asked, momentarily distracted not just by her irritatingly confusing vocabulary but also by the presence of an ungroomed miniature labradoodle who had run across the sands in great excitement to sniff hard at his Tommy Hilfiger-clad crotch.

“Sod off,” he barked at the dog.

“Did you just tell me to sod off?”

Her eyes flamed with anger, blood rose in her sculpted cheeks, her pert breasts heaved with fury.

“Never,” he breathed, a slave now to his pulsing manhood. “Never.”

I walked home, briefly accompanied by someone else’s floppy, olfactorily curious dog. Maybe, I thought, I should just forget the sex and consider penning a murder mystery instead.