Swimming in a saggy sea

During my first summer in Paris when the days were dripping by and we were tired of staring at our melting reflections in the Seine, French announced: "That’s it, we’re hiring a car and driving to Deauville this weekend!"

"You mean Normandy? We’re going to the coast of Normandy, which means we’re going to swim in the English Channel?"

"We’re going to swim in La Manche," French primly corrected me - rather than to encourage me to speak in French it was more to eliminate the qualifier `English', which no doubt encroached upon his patriotic fervour. [He often said that he preferred to take the plane to London because when he took the Eurostar he was forced to alight at Waterloo - the scars of this defeat have strangely been handed down intact to French from his ancestors and he re-lives this battle every time the French lose to the English in any kind of sport].

Swimming in the sleeve of water between England and France didn’t seem to be a whole lot better prospect than swimming in the Seine, and at least a paddle in the Seine, even if it did result in a bad stomache ache, wouldn’t involve a sweating, salty road trip, peppered with traffic jams.

Having travelled frequently between London and Paris by Eurostar through the tunnel under the channel (the chunnel), my vision of this sea was a little out of focus. I saw it as a transport hub and the idea of swimming in it was as pleasant a thought as getting all dolled up with parasol and petticoat to promenade on the side of a highway. I pictured myself wading among the bones of old boats and the discharge of new boats. I saw myself dodging the points of long-buried norman weaponry poking out of rust-coloured sand.

When we did go to Deauville I was a tad relieved to discover that, rather than a mooring spot for norman ghosts and a dump for the junk of a million wars, the beach was in fact a long stretch of fine-sanded, white beach which could rival Sydney's beaches.

I’m a Pacific Ocean snob when it comes to riding the surf, or searching the ultimate ride which the blonded up Patrick Swayze found at Bells Beach, Australia in Point Break. So of course the saggy waves of Deauville were a bit of a downgrade. In fact my first impressions of Deauville were clearly nothing to text home about. It was the Canicule Summer of 2003, the heat had eaten up all the shade and we were left covering our half-naked bodies in palm leaves to protect them from the sun. The sea was a desert; a hot, brown and sandy tub.

It was only when I saw the Claude Lelouch film Un homme et une femme, where Deauville was painted in soft budding pinks and greys as the backdrop to a love story, that I started to reconsider it as a viable beach option.

Admittedly the brownish sandy water near the shore still takes some getting used to compared to the bubbling blue of my beloved Pacific Ocean or the dashing green-blue of the Mediterranean Sea. But it is one of the closest beaches to Paris, and as my mother would say, it’s better than a smack in the eye with a dead fish – which admittedly could be a hazard here, as i'm still not entirely convinced that fish living in this sea feel chipper enough to continue with life and all its burdens.

The backdrop of Norman style manor houses which line the beachfront make it one of those versatile beaches, the kind of place that I love to visit in both winter and summer. I'm yet to see a beach covered in snow but I've heard tempting reports about this from Maine.

The added bonus is that, swimming in La Manche, unlike at Sydney beaches, I don’t have to be on full-time bluebottle alert. Losing children seems to be a bigger danger here, as our day at Deauville recently was constantly interrupted by a loud speaker reporting on yet another unaccompanied child who had been found seemingly dazed by the sun, randomly digging up holes in the sand, and was now waiting to be claimed at the beach orphanage.

As two nearby children learnt to play competitive sports - who has the bigger shriek and who can kick sand the furthest - I speculated whether any of these found children had been intentionally lost for a moment's respite.

Two hours each way on the train, a trip to Deauville gives me a welcome break from the enclosed heat of Paris. It's a quick venture back to something I miss most about Sydney; being able to get to the sea with a shake of your tail, to lick the air and taste salt, diving underwater to escape the sun, and lying on my back watching seagulls weave words in the sky.