The Long Weekend

The plan, as Diego explained it on the Thursday evening, was very simple. They would set off from London at six the next morning, beat the traffic, and be in Cornwall by lunchtime. They would spend three days lying on golden beaches, eating fish and chips and drinking cold drinks while the sun went down over the sea. His flatmates, Emma and Kate, had looked at the weather forecast and had some doubts, but Diego had already booked the cottage, and his enthusiasm was hard to argue with.

They set off at a quarter past eight. Kate could not find her sunglasses, Emma insisted on making sandwiches, and Diego, who had been so keen on an early start, had slept through three alarms. By the time they reached the motorway, so had everyone else in London. It took them two hours to get past Reading.

The car was Emma's, a small, elderly green hatchback called Olive that had never been further than Brighton. Somewhere in Devon, in the middle of a long, empty road between two hills, Olive began to make a coughing noise and slowly came to a stop. Emma looked at the dashboard and closed her eyes. "We've run out of petrol," she said. "I thought you filled it up," said Kate. "I thought Diego filled it up," said Emma. Diego was suddenly very interested in a sheep in the next field.

It was at this point that it started to rain. It was not light rain or a passing shower, but heavy, determined, sideways rain that seemed to have been waiting for them. Diego and Kate walked two miles to the nearest garage with an empty can while Emma stayed in the car and ate all the sandwiches. When they came back, soaked to the skin, they were in no mood to talk about it.

They finally reached the cottage at nine o'clock at night. It was smaller than it had looked in the photos, and it smelled of damp, but it had a wood-burning stove, and the owner had left a cake and a note on the table: "Welcome! Sorry about the weather." The three of them dried their clothes in front of the fire, ate the whole cake and fell asleep to the sound of the rain on the roof.

It was still raining on Saturday morning. It was raining on Saturday afternoon. They walked along the cliffs in borrowed raincoats, visited a museum about tin mining, which was surprisingly interesting, and played every board game in the cottage, some of them twice. Emma and Kate were remarkably patient. Diego kept checking the forecast on his phone as if he could change it by refreshing it often enough.

"We could just give up and go home early," Kate said on Saturday evening. Nobody really wanted to, but nobody could think of a good reason to stay. Then the owner of the cottage, a cheerful woman called Mrs. Penrose, knocked on the door with a box of firewood and asked whether they had tried surfing yet.

"In this weather?" said Emma. Mrs. Penrose laughed. "Love, this is the best weather for it. The waves are perfect when it's like this. My nephew runs a surf school down at the beach. Tell him I sent you." Diego, who had never been on a surfboard and was not a confident swimmer, looked at the other two. To his surprise, they both said yes.

On Sunday morning, in borrowed wetsuits and pouring rain, the three of them stood on a gray beach while a young instructor called Jago taught them how to paddle, how to stand up and, mostly, how to fall off. They fell off a great deal. Kate swallowed what felt like half the Atlantic. Emma managed to stand up on her fourth attempt and was so surprised that she immediately fell off again. Diego did not stand up once all morning, but on the very last wave, he got to his knees and rode it all the way to the sand, shouting with joy.

They drove home on Monday under a clear blue sky, of course. They stopped to fill Olive up three times, just to be sure. Somewhere near Exeter, Kate said, "Same time next month?" Emma said she had already looked up the price of a second-hand board. Diego, whose nose was slowly getting sunburnt through the car window, just smiled. He had planned a relaxing weekend on the beach. He had ended up taking up a new hobby instead.