All Summer Long: A Cornish Beach Boy

Description

Kenny spills his love of Cornwall onto the pages of All Summer Long. His four years as a lifeguard on Cornwall’s gorgeous beaches during the ‘swinging’ Sixties and Seventies saw him reveling in the liberating glories of surf, sand and their sensualities.

These Cornish summers were a celebration of hedonistic ‘coming-of-age’ where the coast distills Kenny’s reflections on dealing with holidaymakers, locals and girlfriends various.

His life has the unceasing theme of water running through it from surfing, diving, sailing, rowing and feasting on the fruits of seafood and seaweed. Did you know that an appreciation of surfing can wash your life clean?

This is Kenny's cherishing of the unexpected profitability of dead seals and the life-saving sustenance of hot pasties: gaze on the sea, climb aboard, paddle out, “catch a wave and you’re living on top of the world; from a wave-crest everything becomes clear”.

Kenny Maule’s family ‘transported’ him to St. Ives, Cornwall at the age of ten. He was born on the Ayrshire coast; however, it was on the glorious Cornish beaches that he began surfing when Malibu surfing was brand-new on this unspoiled coastline. Whilst at university he escaped westwards every summer, to be a professional lifeguard on Sennen Beach in Whitesands Bay, West Cornwall. After graduating, he spent six months as a teacher in Barbados, and three more months hitch-hiking through the USA, Canada, Alaska then overland through Central America to ‘hidden’ Popayan in the Andes of Colombia. Deciding the oceans were big, but not quite big enough, and anyway the skies were even bigger, Kenny learnt to fly with British Airways and later was a flying-instructor working almost everywhere in the world, including China, Russia, France and India. Living now over the three interconnected, and seaweed-scented, harbours of a cosy, wee North Sea fishing port, there’s just enough time to scribble his enduring love of the sea, using one pensive finger in wet sand.