One of those creatures on the beach
(3 May 2026)
There are people who look young, there are others who look old, and then there is a third group made up of those who look recognisably young even though they also look — in an agonising and contagious way — much older.
This last category would include those magical creatures of yesteryear who used to appear, out of nowhere, next to you when you were sitting on your towel on the beach.
They would come and go at precise intervals like the prime-number years of cicadas when they come out to reproduce. They had a unique tan tone that somehow involved the colour grey and green. They were blatantly about forty years old although they blatantly looked eight hundred, and they would inform you that they were carrying beer and soft drinks in their portable cooler held in one hand by a whitish handle — that handle with an invariable shade of white immune to the effect of the almighty sunlight on the beach.
Since I haven’t been to a beach in a long time, I do not know if this species still survives among us. Whatever the case may be, and putting aside the physical-aspect feature, I see myself as one of those creatures every time I retweet an (ignored) poll that I had set up to last the maximum allowed period of seven days.