I HAVEN’T SEEN ONE OF THOSE FOR YEARS

You’ll have gathered as you make your way across this book’s wide beach (sandals off, holding them in your hand as you wander) that I’m more of a wanderer than a sailor. Give me a cliffside path over a speedboat ride any day. Let me lounge in a harbourside café and let me not be tempted by a trip round the bay on a bobbing vessel.

As you’ll also have seen from these pages, however, I did spend some time making a few little films for the TV programme Coast, which often involved something the producers called Mild Jeopardy and which at the time would often scare me to death but which would provide me with handy anecdote-fodder for years to come.

And I guess that’s why I’m slithering around like an ungainly eel on the slippery floor of a cave not far from the seaside town of Girvan in Ayrshire. ‘Take your time’ the director says, holding a light. I should have been warned about the mild jeopardy in this shoot when the cameraman’s business card, which fell from his bag as he hoisted it up, declared him to be not just a cameraman but an Adventure Cameraman.

In this bit of the film I was to scramble around in the cave to tell the story of Sawney Bean. Briefly, Sawney Bean was a Scottish cannibal in the eighteenth century who would lure unsuspecting travellers into his cave and eat them with much smacking of lips. My dad used to say the name in a scary voice if he wanted to frighten me, but because he was so gentle and kind I just had to pretend to be scared, sometimes so convincingly that my dad apologised. The scrambly bit in the cave was the most difficult bit, the producer told me. The next day would be the easy day: I just had to interview somebody on the beach (Jeopardy: getting a pebble in my shoe) and then I had to do some pieces to camera from a boat as another smaller boat followed to film me gazing moodily out to sea when I’d finished talking to the camera (Jeopardy: slight headache from moody gazing). That night I slept well and in the morning I had a hearty breakfast just because I was in a hotel and also because talking to a camera and gazing moodily out to sea never counts as work to me. One day I will definitely get that badge that reads ‘Will spout bollocks for cash’.

The first part of the filming, the interview on the beach, went well once both the interviewee and I had got used to the discomfort of sitting on pebbles and once she’d got used to the fact that I would be asking her the same questions over and over again and that she’d have to give more or less the same answers as the Adventure Cameraman caught us and preserved us from different angles. We all got used to looking at the sky as the sun went behind a cloud and somebody shouted ‘Waiting for the light!’ The camera lingered over shots of me and the interviewee wandering down the beach with the sea behind us, as flat as a picnic table.

Then it was time to get on the small boat and wait for the smaller boat to start to chug behind us as we headed out to sea. I did a couple of pieces to camera and a selection of Moody Gazes. The sea was calm and the breeze was more invigorating than intimidating. I stood by the man who was steering the boat and we chatted and the cameraman filmed it; he filmed it in an adventurous way by climbing on top of the fragile-looking cabin to capture the tops of our heads.

Then the captain (I reckon that’s what he was) pointed out to sea where the horizon was a smudge, a line of faint paint spilt on a distant kitchen floor. ‘I’ve not seen one of those for years,’ he said conversationally. ‘One of what?’ I said. I imagined he might be pointing out an albatross. ‘A wave like that,’ he said. ‘It might get a bit lumpy.’

Ah, the good old English language telling you exactly what was going to happen but then curling it around metaphor’s little finger. The last time I’d heard ‘lumpy’ used in this context was as I sat on a tiny plane as it trundled down the runway at the short-lived Sheffield City Airport at the start of a flight to Belfast. Strong winds whipped over the motorway by the Tinsley Viaduct and the plane jostled and jolted alarmingly. And we were still on the tarmac. The air hostess came round with a basket of mints. The pilot’s voice crackled over the tannoy: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, as you can see it’s a touch windy so the ascent will be a little lumpy.’

He was right. As the plane struggled to climb the sky’s scaffolding, the man behind me said ‘I wish I’d gone on the boat!’ I sucked my mint.

And now here it was again. The L word. The wave rushed towards us as though it was pleased to see us. It slapped the boat like we were a fly and it was a swatter. We roller-coastered around and my hearty breakfast planned hearty revenge. The small boat behind us was being hurled about even more than we were. The man steering it was laughing. He was shouting something to me but I couldn’t hear him; I cupped my ear and staggered to the back of the boat. His mouth was open like the cave we’d been filming in the day before. He had a very loud voice and eventually I caught what he said in my cupped ear. ‘I WENT TO BARNSLEY ONCE,’ he said. I raised a feeble thumb.

We tried to do my pieces to camera, we really tried. It wasn’t too bad for me because I had something to concentrate on but the boat was lurching around so much that the lurching was taking over the story so that my pieces to camera became less about Sawney Bean and more about the weather conditions. To my relief the decision was taken to turn back and do the pieces to camera walking around the walls of Girvan Harbour which, as far as we knew, would stay very solid and still. ‘Right, we’re turning back,’ the director said. I tried to sound casual when I asked the captain how long it would take. I pointed to the safe haven of Girvan Harbour, which looked as though it was just at the far end of a fairly long room.

‘About two and a half hours,’ he said. There is a word for the way time can stretch into something impossibly and tortuously long: lumpy.