Episode Details

In my late teens and early 20s I was obsessed with beaches. I had always liked them, we all do, but I think it was a trip to Thailand in 1989 that triggered the obsession. Being on Koh Phangan back then when there was barely any power on the island - you had to go to back to Koh Samui for the full moon parties - smoking joints, lounging about in hammocks, philosophising with my mates, talking about our futures, watching the world go by, swimming, snorkelling, playing endless games of frisbee and volleyball on the white sands as sunny days drifted into beautiful sunsets, is a time I will always cherish. 

After that trip, I used to endlessly contemplate beaches - didn’t matter if they were tropical or Cornish, Mediterranean or in Bournemouth - they all have something to appreciate and enjoy. As a young writer trying to get stuff published, I wrote and wrote about them. Then, in 1996, The Beach was published. Alex Garland’s debut novel caught a zeitgeist and took the world by storm, eventually becoming a film with Leonardo di Caprio. Anything beach related would now be copycat. Garland  owned the subject and I had to move on.

I always wanted to end up on a tropical beach somewhere. I’ve left it a bit late, but the dream still lingers, though, like many a dream of my youth, it’s somewhat faded.

Today, generally speaking, the thought of a really crowded beach, packed with sardine holidaymakers, fills me with a certain amount of horror. It probably does you. I’d pick the Maldives over St Tropez pretty much any day of the week (even though I’ve never actually been to the Maldives). As for Bournemouth beach in a heatwave, I’ll almost certainly pass.

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A Free Market Success Story

This week my two sons and I have come to Ksamil in the south of Albania for a boys’ holiday. I put a post on Twitter - should we go to Bulgaria and the Black Sea or Kotor in Montenegro? Something Tom Winnifrith said persuaded me to come to Albania instead. I liked the idea of flying to Corfu and then getting the ferry across. And I heard the beaches were nice. 

We arrived after a journey that was a lot more drawn out than I would have liked, went for an early evening stroll and oh, how my heart sank. The beaches were probably the most crowded I have ever seen. Crap music blared out. You seem to have to hire sunbeds, which cost €25 - there are three of us, have I got to pay €75 a day just to get on the beach? Negativity prevailed.

The following morning I spoke to Ilir, the extremely helpful proprietor of the 6 Milje hotel, where we are staying. 

“What do people normally do with their phones when they go swimming?” I asked him.

“You have to understand, the beaches here are not like the beaches in Italy or Spain, public beaches, and maybe your stuff isn’t safe,” he said. “Here in Albania nothing gets stolen”. 

I raised a doubtful eyebrow.

“The beaches are privately owned,” he explained.

He had said the magic words and my ears pricked up. 

“It means you have to pay, ha ha ha,” he laughed. “They want the money. But everything is taken care of.”

I couldn’t help myself. 

“Are you familiar with the Tragedy of the Commons?” I asked. “When everybody uses the resource but nobody looks after it, because nobody owns it. You see it in the oceans, in the common parts of social housing -”

“Yes, yes,” he said dismissively.

I don’t know how these Albania beaches were procured in the first place. The way assets were seized after the fall of communism in Russia was not exactly salubrious. I expect something similar happened in Albania as communism went down here. Ilir agreed.

“Probably,” he said. “But somebody has to pay,” he went on. “They made a big investment. Before Ksamil was just rocky. They brought in all the sand.”