Smile

It was an exciting moment when a package of catalogues arrived from Beautiful Books with my book Surf Mama in them. But I had to take a tea break when I saw that Anthony Burgess was on the same page as me. It felt like the literary equivalent of what happened to me on the beach the other day.….

When I described my local beach as being a place where you could “shoot the swimwear issue of Sports Illustrated without hiring models.” I thought it gave a good idea of the atmosphere, but I didn’t mean it literally.… 

Then a few weeks ago I got a call from my friend Maia who was over on a surf trip. We go back to neo-naturist days, but our backgrounds are a bit different . She’s a classic Californian surf babe - while I was hanging round the crouch end Lido waiting for the invention of the wave machine, she was a bodysurfing champion in Orange County. She also has her own deluxe sportswear line, Mother of Pearl , so I don’t try to keep up with her apres surf style either.

She called me to tell me there were some nice waves in the bay, and why didn’t I come and join her and the girls.…..?

I was working in the studio, but I find the muse tends to leave me pretty quickly when I hear the words ‘nice waves.’ It’s like telling an alcoholic there’s a nice bottle of Malt whiskey on the table next door. I can keep going through the motions, but my mind is elsewhere.

As I said, I don’t try to compete. My motto is  If you can’t beat them, don’t waste energy trying, so I go for a 90s grunge revival look - I check my face for paint stains, and leave without changing, luckily I notice just as I leave that my hair is tied up with an old sock. I don’t even bother to raid Daisy’s make-up case for waterproof mascara - it’s a break you surf about half a mile out and I don’t think anyone will be able to check out my eyelashes from that distance.

But it turns out that what Maia really meant to say was, “Why don’t you come down and meet me and the supermodels?“

She’s waiting for me with two Hawaiian surfers who have both featured in the Sports Illustrated Swimwear Issue. They’re the sort of women who make those lists you read in Hello! magazine in the doctors waiting room.... The World’s Most Beautiful Women, Sexiest, Best Dressed, Best Undressed. The sort of women who get paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to be photographed in bikinis.

I’ve had my moments - I was Miss St. Martins one year, in a very fetching mermaid tail and tourquoise bodypaint, and I once entered the hallowed portal of the Sun Page Three studio. Again in was in the name of performance art.….. The neo-naturists were invited for a whacky women type photoshoot, and accepted, thinking we could destroy the system from the inside. But we ended up arguing with the photographer because he wanted us to keep our knickers on and we refused on principle. Luckily it was before the days of photoshop, otherwise they’d have cut and pasted some saucy lace thongs on, and we’d have had a legal battle on our hands proving that we were in fact naked.….

I’m not going to put myself down, I still look okay in the right light - about 25 watts. If I was in the Crouch End lido over fifties swimsuit parade, I might have a shot at a place on the podium …. but I’m a bit out of my league here.  I hadn’t even started the Zumba classes, so I wasn’t sure if was necessary for Maia to get out a camera as I struggled into my body firming neoprene babygro as quickly as I could.

Even so, I was coping, my ego was down but not out.  Then a surfer I’d had a crush on for a while came over, ostensibly to take a picture of us all together.

“Where are you girls from?” He asked smoothly.

Why did Hawaii that sound so much more glamourous than Highgate suddenly? The North Shore so much more hardcore than North London?

“I live just up the road, I met you at that party on the beach....” His eyed flicker over for a split second of faint recognition.

“Oh yeah,” he says quickly, before turning back to the others. “So.….. where are you girls from again?”

Then he points the camera towards us and says “Smile”. I see then that it wouldn’t have worked out anyway, he’s obviously not very smart … I mean smile? What do I have to smile about standing here between Miss September and Miss February in my studio underwear?

No, he’d have to have given me something more concrete to smile about than that.

I know, I know. I was being hypersensitive.… I mean it’s not all about how we look in our bikinis is it? Of course not! I thought afterwards, next time I see him, I’ll tell him that I’m really good at drawing, because I know that’s important to men too.…..