1000 WORDS

Santa Catalina is a fishing village circled by real estate sharks. There is already blood in the water and so it is only a matter of time before the feeding frenzy begins in earnest.

But right now you can still meet a surfer from Devon there who attended the same boarding school as Winston Churchill yet walks and talks with the angels and aspires to draw all his sustenance from sunlight. Or spend the sunset hour over a cup of tea with a ex-SWAT team Memphis policeman turned soul searching beach bum. But I cannot claim that any of the charaters involved are fictional and their stories are probably not mine to tell.

You can lie on your back on a cliff top listening to the waves roll in against the shore and pick out the constellations you recognise in the night sky in real darkness. At this time of year, before midnight, Scorpio sits low towards the horizon in the south west. But if you happen to wake in the wee early hours not so long before dawn and raise your eyes to the heavens it is Orion, Pelaides, Tauras and Gemini that you will find there. And tonight Venus will rise just above the thinnest sliver of a new moon above the island.

You can find opportunity to ponder the statement that you are more likely to get struck by lightening than be attacked by a shark. And then be provided with proof through encountering a guy who makes his living diving, surfs in his spare time, and, of course, has never been savaged by any form of marine life. His father, who cannot swim and so clearly is more in danger of drowning than being eaten by a shark, has had the misfortune of having been struck by lightening twice. You can try to imagine the mathematical equation that might accurately describe the myriad possibilities and probabilities contained in those relationships.

In a village you can discover that what to some people are incorrigible problem neighbours, to you, turn out to be a series of shy and serious children who come to your door for help with their homework or to borrow the hoola hoops you happen to have leaning up against the wall by the back door or ask to use your bicycle pump or occasionally beg a little cooking oil or salt on behalf of even shyer adults. Their mother – or maybe it is an aunt - will stand quietly in the background observing. Later, if a horse happens  to wander through the yard in the rain and you manage to catch the beast and return it to its place, tethered to the shared fence, that same woman might promise that you can ride it on a day when the sun is shining.

You can observe first hand the relative merits of a big stick and harsh words or a small treat and a lot of kindness in the realm of dog management and use the information to extrapolate various other lessons about life.