‘Can you get back on it?’ he asks, perched perfectly on his paddle board, reaching out his hand.
He’s blonde, with immaculate skin and a proper summer holiday tan, all of about 23 years old. When I think back on this, I’ll recast him as the guy who plays young Stellan Skarsgard in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, which means when I think back on this, he’s Swedish, even though I don’t think that was the case.
‘I’m fat and gay and dyspraxic,’ I say between salt water splutters, a driech Sunday afternoon submerged in the Atlantic Ocean, absolutely baltic.
Stellan looks back at me expectantly, like he’s never considered that someone might not be able to hop straight back on a paddle board after falling off, unceremoniously, and into the sea, this guy who seems like he was born an Outdoor Activities Instructor.
‘No,’ I say, pursing my lips, and he ties a rope around my ankle, winches me back to dry land.
‘Oh, here she comes,’ says my colleague, Iain, sat on the shore, watching our stuff but mostly eating crisps. ‘The Little Mermaid.’
There’s a little girl building a sandcastle with her Mum and Dad beside him. She looks up, expectantly. I give her my best Disney Princess wave, regal. She laughs.
And I’m laughing, too.
I’m running this adventure weekend for LEAP Sports Scotland, taking a group of twentysomething trans kids to get out in the countryside. It’s the sort of youth work I love, proper, old-fashioned gorge-walking with goths youth work, where the focus is on young people getting together and having a nice time rather than a series of tick box outcomes to please some funder who’s never actually met anyone under 35.
We’ve already ‘bagged’ our first Munro, traversed The Lost Valley – Coire Gabhail – where some of the MacDonalds of Glencoe hid from the Jacobites during the Glencoe Massacre in 1692 and where a trans boy called Jake dropped his vape pen into a muddy river and said it was the saddest day of his whole life.
We’ve been canoeing on the sea, where we saw a seal sunning itself on a rock, and one of the kids christened it Shady Sady. We’ve been rock climbing, where the instructor tied me to a skinny 17 year old and told me it was okay if I fell, because they would anchor me to the ground, and I had to tell her that that wasn’t how gravity worked.
There’s this received wisdom in my family and amongst my friends that I’m "not Outdoorsy", and it’s a role I’ve played up to in the past.
It’s true, I generally prefer a city break (museums, bars, coffee shops, oh my!) to a country jaunt (mud? Birds? Trees? Boring). The idea of spending a night in a tent brings me out in hives, and the one time I did spend the night in a tent, I actually came out in hives, so I think that’s fair, really.
But being here – in Oban in general, I mean, not washed up on the shore at Oban beach – has forced me to interrogate that word, Outdoorsy, and my own relationship with it.
As a kid, I actually spent a lot of time outside.
My most potent summer holiday memories are of me and an assortment of cousins and friends throwing ourselves down a steep mud slide all day and laughing (this was before phones, so you had to make your own fun). I liked going on bike rides, building dens, catching minnows and finding frogspawn in the river.
Even then, I wouldn’t have been considered Outdoorsy.
Outdoorsy meant a very specific sort of person, someone who was into shooting or fishing or things that involved carabiners and having a sunburnt nose. Someone taut and active, someone competitive. Outdoorsiness meant someone solitary, Friedrich’s Wanderer in a trackie and flat cap. Outdoorsiness was something for boys – real boys, straight boys, boys who liked roughhousing and conquering things – not people like me.
But here I am, washed up on the shore at Oban beach, pissing myself laughing. And I love it.
And I’ve already reevaluated what it means to be Outdoorsy.
It means doing and being and laughing, sometimes with people – people like you – who might not fit into the traditional mold of what it means to be Outdoorsy, but who belong here just as much. It means trying stuff out, and not being embarrassed when it doesn’t work. It means finding joy in small, stupid things, and in the company of other people.
Lying on that beach, I realize that maybe it’s not about being a certain type of person, but about finding your own way to enjoy the outdoors.
‘Do you want a crisp?’ Iain says, offering me his bag.