Tribe and tide: Navigating Island

By Emma Elobeid

Pictures Christian Warren

We’re now on our sixth island-anchored lap round the sun. Over five hundred and fifty-eight days of summer – roughly the same number of sandcastles – we’ve not once felt the slightest temptation to holiday elsewhere. Is a seven-year itch to be expected? Will the backwash from this strange new stay-put world put a new orbital spin on such summer contentment? Will our Island paradise still feel like paradise now that we’ve all embraced staycationing? Spoiler of the summer: absolutely.

The connection between rootedness and freedom is a curious thing. To some, becoming intimately familiar with the same place year-after-year might seem like liberty lost. Not to me. With each passing summer the Island claims a bigger share of my identity; giving a hyggelig sense of belonging and fuelling creativity. The beach is maker and keeper of our family’s summertime stories, both #blessed and gritty alike – memories that stand the test of time with all the sticking power of a mussel’s byssus threads. In one quarter-mile strip of sand and sea alone, I can pinpoint the exact stump of driftwood where our youngest had his heart broken by the loss of an irreplaceable yellow periwinkle; and the precise coordinates where, two summers ago, my husband and our eldest were chased through the water by a tiny but particularly buoyant jumping shrimp. Memories that are held not just in spaces, but in sayings too: I will never again look at a rocky cluster of grey molluscs without imagining them in a slow race to the sea after the year our tallest sea urchin thought limpets

Travel not required: precious family memories are made on our doorstep

were called ‘Olympits’. Recently, our mini-merman has taken to pointing out the wobbly jelly-like ‘enemies’ while rock pooling – no bad thing, perhaps, given his partiality to a dark red juicy Godshill cherry. You know you’ve transitioned from ‘Overner’ to ‘Islander’ when you reference your own invented place names: over the ‘pooh-stick bridge’, through the ‘prickly path’ all the way to the ‘wild beach’. And it’s here – at the Wild Beach – that we frequently begin the day on summer mornings: with Priory Woods sheltering us from behind and St. Helens Fort up ahead, it’s the very definition of pure Island happiness. As the heat rises, we head down to the beach earlier and earlier; drinking in the morning sun in virtual solitude. Often, that means breakfast on the beach. Truth be told, it’s more of an eight-a.m. summer smörgåsbord of random assortments: slices of lemon loaf if they’re lucky (worthy replacement to lockdown banana bread) along with a peach or three (inhaled), peas from the garden (the podding of which offers a moment of parental peace) and obligatory summer watermelon. As they ride the wings of their watermelon sugar high, I breathe it all in.

Home again – feet cleaned under the hosepipe, towels beaten of sand

– we fall into a freewheeling brand of summer somewhere between ‘wannabee homesteader’ and ‘eighties throwback’. On balance – given the daybed under the runner beans, my slow descent into socks-and-crocs garden attire and the recent blanket ban on space hoppers for the sake of the spinach – slightly more former than latter. Either way, the aim is the same: a life less complicated.

If this year has taught us anything, it’s that we don’t need to sail the seven seas in order to appreciate our own little patch of paradise. I wish summer could stay this simple forever. Maybe it can.

Beach-based breakfasts are a summer fruit feast

Follow more family adventures in this series from our Mum on an Island. If you have any questions or ideas we’d love to hear them. Please email office@styleofwight.co.uk