Until the age of 16, I’d never laid on a beach. I’d certainly never stretched out and consciously attempted the act known as sunbathing. Why? Because I was raised by wolves. Really! Big, shaggy wolves that used to suckle me wolf-milk and talked to me in their own wolfy-language. No, alright, I wasn’t raised by wolves… but that’s what I used to try to get people to believe, mostly because I was too embarrassed of the truth: I was raised by hippies.            

In Britain, in case you hadn’t noticed, we don’t really have beaches you can lie on – not, of course, unless you want to turn blue and be rushed to hospital to get your fingers amputated for frostbite. We have spectacular sea lochs, some wonderful cliffs and stunning estuaries, but no real beaches you can spread your towel out on and sunbathe. (A friend claimed he once sunbathed on Blackpool beach during the particularly hot summer of 1976. I never believed him). If you wanted to lie on a beach all day, you had to head off to the Costa Del Crapos on some package holiday, and for my parents, package holidays were second only to the Holocaust in terms of badness. So, as a result, I was 16 before I found myself, towel in hand, about to stretch out on a patch of sand. I have to say, the whole experience felt very wrong. It still does.           

This is what puzzles me: what, precisely, are you meant to do on a beach holiday? My childhood holidays were spent making dens in caves, jumping into freezing mountain rivers and dressing up like a hobbit (fact: I used to dress up like a hobbit). I still find the idea of lying in the sun and doing nothing rather obscene. It exemplifies a level of idleness that would get even professional loafers like Bertrand Russell boiling with rage and demanding the introduction of forced labour programmes. Spending the day sunbathing seems to be more self-indulgent, and with a stronger whiff of sin, than spending the day furiously masturbating. It certainly displays a greater paucity of imagination. Think of all the things you could be doing! Learn to play guitar! Stalk a celebrity! Take up bum-fencing! No. Instead, you went and spent two weeks lying in the sun, like some living negation of the idea of human volition. Well done you.            

That’s another thing about beach holidays. Most people choose to go to places where most people choose to go. Beaches end up looking like car-parks for pan-fried human corpses. I find the idea of squeezing your towel in between a fat lady called Bogdana and a trucker from Baia Mare absolutely baffling. However, that said, I’m also flummoxed by the idea of going to an empty beach. Anyone who lies in the sun, eyes closed, on a deserted beach, is basically enjoying ‘experiential death’, a kind of living purgatory. (Or is it limbo? The Pope decided to wipe one of them from Catholic ontology last year, and I’m not sure which…)            

So, for successful beach holiday you need to get the right balance of busyness. It’s a classic bell-curve. Too few people, and you’re relaxing weekend will end up looking like Lord of the Flies re-enacted by adults covered in Factor 12. Too many, and you’ll end up going on a killing spree with a yellow plastic child’s spade. And, to get round to the point of all of this, Vama Veche seems to have peaked at the perfect ratio.         

I first went to Vama in 2000. It’s changed enormously, probably for the worse. I say probably. For me, with the possible exception of the peak season, Vama is still doing just fine. I’ve certainly not got any time for the people who complain about the ‘good old days’ when there was one cow in the village and you had to pleasure a farm worker to get a bucket of milk. No Sir, since they dismantled the monstrosity that was Bavaria Club, Vama has been just-about-right-for-me, thank-you-very-much.

The whole point about Vama is that it’s a place to bump into likeminded people, caftan-wearing philosophy professors and drunken pre-teens demanding 10,000 Lei for the bus to Mangalia. A thirty second drive through Mamaia should be enough to counter the argument that Vama has been ‘spoiled’, a reminder of the fact that what we have there is something genuinely special. I like to think of it as being a kind of Romanian Goa, but without the terrible music, braying public-schoolkids and middle-class trustafarian wastrels. (Erm, so, basically not like Goa at all, then). Plus I’ve discovered that sunbathing all day has some kind of point to it when you spent the night before so drunk that you couldn’t figure out in which direction the sea lies. It all, at last, makes perfect sense.  

Perhaps this isn’t your idea of fun. More solitude? Head to the Delta. More high-heels? Head to Hell-Hole Mamaia. Just don’t start complaining how it was ‘back in the day’, or I’ll be forced to reprimand you with this yellow plastic spade...