It was an otherwise unassuming summer day where the sun was bright, the sky a bright form of blue and the air so warm, there was little to do but find yourself a beach and sit yourself down.
It was early January, so people were flittering around, but a weekday; the spaces in the sand hinting to the fact many others had gone back to work.
I walked down to the beach closest to my house, towel in hand, book in other. It’s a calm, quiet stretch of beach that has a funny way of soothing the most frantic of minds.
I lay down and began reading. Within moments I had company.
“Hi,” he said. He had an inflatable lilo in hand and, such is the universal beach uniform for men, wore a pair of board shorts and not much else. “I am just going to sit here.”
It wasn’t a question. He would be sitting down ‘here‘.
‘Here’ was on the edge of my towel. He positioned himself on top of his desperately oversized lilo, which covered a corner of my towel.
I was annoyed, not least because a sand-infested lilo was staining the towel I only just shook clean, but because my time alone is not the kind of thing I appreciate being invaded.
I was impressed by how many different thoughts consumed my mind in the space of just a few seconds. Do I indulge him? Be polite? Tell him to f*ck off?
“Sorry, I’m actually just reading,” was the response I settled on.
He looked at me. There was no doubt he was taken aback. Perhaps every other time he sat his entitled arse down on someone’s towel, he had stumbled on a person much better, much more polite, than me.
Top Comments
I think it's easy after the moment to have the "perfect" response, but in the actual moment, you're not expecting this to happen, so why would it be expected for you to have the right answer, let alone any. I probably would have frozen as well if that had happened, but now at least (the only good from this), you have experienced something like this, which not only will help you next time, if God forbid it happens again ( which I sincerely hope it doesn't!), but it also brings awareness to others who can learn from this. You have nothing to be ashamed of.
Unfortunately this is the reason I don't like being anywhere by myself, pub, park, beach, restaurant. I know that in this day and age women should be able to be in any situation by themselves and not feel intimidated or uneasy, but it is men, like this guy, who make it difficult and uneasy for women. You just never know what the person is going to do if you politely ask them to leave you alone. I was in a bar, that I would frequent often as it was close to where I lived and I knew the owner, when this guy came up and just sat at my table, which I felt was very odd as there were plenty of tables vacant. I smiled politely and went back to my phone, he asked if he could buy me a drink, I said no, he kept pestering me, until the owner asked him to move back to his group, or he could leave the bar. He left the bar, humiliated, but what I did not know was that he waited for me to leave, to accost me outside, later on. Fortunately my then partner was there to pick me up. Sometimes a bruised ego is the catalyst for something worse.