Holiday: a man backstrokes oh so gently in the hotel pool. It’s breakfast time. Bean juice coagulates on my plate.
I watch the man’s languid, enchanting backstroke and, for some reason, it inflates my heart with sentimental joy. This semi-corpulent middle-aged man, is, right now, The Most Beautiful Thing On Earth:
His arcing limbs do not slap or thrash, but plop into the drink like skipping stones. He is a babbling brook. A water feature. The splish-splosh trickle-truckle of a spa waiting room.
And what’s more, this forty-something baldy gliding through the water fills me with love for all humanity, because he seems blithely rapt in absolute peace (despite the room rates at this place).
But then, I realise, all of this might be free association of the mind linking this moment to a scene in the Oscar winning motion picture: Forrest Gump; when a legless Lieutenant Dan makes peace with God (for taking his legs), and backstrokes with the same carefree beauty into a pink and orange sunrise
(funny how the mind does that).
And suddenly the bubble of beauty is burst. The portly swimmer becomes just that (FYI: legs intact), and my wife returns from the buffet with a plate of vibrant fruit segments; Cheshire melon and the greenest kiwi I’ve ever seen. Lo! Only now have I tasted true kiwi. And I remember: I’m on honeymoon! And my wife, in this moment, and forever more, shall be the only human to be known as: The Most Beautiful Thing On Earth.
Similar to the way Forrest felt about Jenny, in the Oscar winning motion picture: Forrest Gump.