Evicted from our house, we continued to live nearby in our car. There were two other ‘households’ resident in the seaside car park: a family of Eastern Europeans in a van, and two African women in a peeling-paint blue wooden beach hut.

One day when TPR was ‘out’ exercising, I heard a cry from one of the Africans. I looked over and saw that she was holding up a melon.

‘There’s free fruit on the shoreline!’ she shouted.

This was an opportunity too good to miss. Still dressed in my blue flowered pyjamas, I ran across the tarmac to the grassy clifftop. Beneath me I could see yellow melons bouncing in the water, and big bunches of banana strewn along the shore.

‘Great’, I thought, ‘Fruit salad all round!’

All I needed to do now was pick my way along the rough path down through the brambles to gather this unusual harvest from the sea.