With lockdown finally eased, I’m craving a trip to the beach. I need to check it hasn’t disappeared, that the horizon is still there, the waves still rolling in and out.

Perhaps I’m being a Covidiot. The beach is still off limits. And it’ll be a hundred degrees, with burning hot sand that’s probably already too hot to safely walk on. But I need to see the sea. 

I also want reassurance that the existence of the rest of the world isn’t just a figment of my imagination and that life outside the compound we call home, the concrete compound we’ve barely ventured out of for all these weeks, is continuing. 

There’s little scenery to speak of in our compound – just bricks and mortar, and pavement and roads laid out in rows. Pre-pandemic beautification efforts in private gardens and porches add bursts of colour, but the greenery in communal areas is already beginning to wither. It’s almost as though it’s recoiling from what’s to come – the long summer months during which grass, plants and shrubs are scorched by the hottest sun on earth.

If life doesn’t feel dystopian enough now, it surely will by the end of August,

I find myself day-dreaming about walking through a lush forest, under a canopy of trees. The kids kicking leaves, even building a treehouse. Friendly woodpeckers tapping away, and that most English of birds – the Robin Redbreast – ducking and diving through the branches.

Though, if I’m entirely honest, I know this isn’t the reality for most Brits in lockdown. In the neighbourhood I lived in when I first moved to London, if I saw anything green, it was more likely to be a crisp packet floating by, or a discarded beer bottle. 

But I can’t be the only desert dweller craving visiting a beauty spot with room to breathe and listen, with nature all around, and who’s wondering why on earth they chose to live in the desert.

Still, now is not the time to make major life decisions – it is a time to whinge about the ones we’ve made in the past. 

And so it was that, after weeks of me complaining about not visiting the beach, DH finally snapped. 

“Let’s go on a staycation – just for a night,” he suggested.

“But we CAN’T,” I wailed. “We can’t afford it – we should be saving every dirham right now, not spending our money at lavish hotels.”

“Actually, if it cheers you up, it’ll be worth every dirham.”

To be continued