A homesick Irishman is the last person you expect to find on a storm-wrecked Swanbourne beach on a Sunday morning. It was not yet 8am and the wind was biting. As the kids and I climbed over the craggy rocks jutting out over the point, we spotted a middle-aged dad and his two small boys down in the cove. They were fossicking about in the great mounds of seaweed coughed up by the still surging ocean.

My three kids were keen to see what mysterious flotsam those boys were collecting in their buckets. So the dad and I got talking. His wife was sleeping off a nurse’s nightshift, he told me, and his boys needed to blow off steam. My own husband had just flown in from the Philippines, I told him, and we’d abandoned the house so he could enjoy his jetlag in peace.