The signboard en route to the beach is just one word: Larga. Meaning “Long”. Three kilometres to be precise. I’m here with Liz and Juan (his name is still misspelt and still intentionally. The explanation takes up too much space!) on a breezy Sunday morning. Just early enough to be awake, not so early that we’re sleepwalking.

I may not have mentioned this before, but I LOVE beaches. They formed the repeating landscape of my childhood — Karachi, Bombay, Madras, Bangkok — and in each place we went very often and stayed all day. Had wonderful picnic lunches. Played silly games. Built sand castles and sand tunnels. Tried hard to drown. Collected shells. Sometimes we stayed the night: Once, in Thailand, we slept in a stilt-house that became marooned in the water when the tide came in. Sometimes we had animal encounters: In Karachi’s Hawk’s Bay, we caught a solitary turtle hatchling, a living jewel the size of my six-year-old palm, swimming out to the open ocean. Then we wished it well and let it go.

All these happy memories came crowding in alongside this week’s visit to Tarragona’s Long Beach. It’s one of the best ones I’ve been to, since those distant childhood days. What makes a beach good? The quality of the sand underfoot is soft AND firm. The water is clear and the waves are just right for walking through. There are no lurking jellyfish or seaweed or muck at the shoreline. And there aren’t too many other humans either. Much as I love Elsewhere, I have to admit that its beach is often strewn with slumbering mounds of shiny pink sunbathers and overrun by hyperactive adrenaline junkies with their fluorescent surfboards.

Larga, at eight o’clock Sunday morning, had a wonderfully sedate population of thoughtful, slow-moving and mostly middle-aged visitors. The men had broad midsections and the women had jiggles and pouches. The great majority were reasonably well-covered but a couple of women had gone topless. Mind you, it wasn’t immediately obvious. “Have you noticed,” I said, “that the few ladies who have chosen to go bare-breasted have remarkably flat chests?”

“Ohh,” said Juan, “it’s just the day’s selection! I assure you, it is not always so.” As we talked about comparative norms of nudity in different cultures, another woman went past. Her body swayed and flowed in graceful curves with every movement. What is it about bodies? Some of them seem to sing! While others merely bark or grunt. And then there are those people, like the woman I remember seeing on Elsewhere’s beach, so aged in appearance that even her wrinkles had wrinkles. Yet there she was in her micro-tiny string-kini, striding along proud and fearless!

We all agreed, as I described her, that fearless old ladies are what we should all aspire to be. Then we went into the nearest beachside café and had a wonderful coffee accompanied by an equally wonderful croissant.

Manjula Padmanabhan, author and artist, writes of her life in the fictional town of Elsewhere, US, in this weekly column

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