60 seconds of 2026

13 September 2026

As an answer to the writing club prompt: Write about one 60-second moment from your life this year.

I used to dislike seaside holidays. Whenever I was forced to go, I would enjoy a little swim and then be bored stiff on the beach, never understanding the point of baking under the sun. That was until I realized that I could dig a hole in the sand rather than sit around. Now, every year, I look forward to our beach holidays and the moment I can hit the sand and start digging. I start off without a plan, and my project develops as I dig.

This year after I started digging I realized that there was only about an hour before the tide flooded my project. In St Malo the sea goes hundreds of meters back at the ebb, and comes right to the city walls, swallowing the five-kilometer long beach completely at high tide. The sea is alive there.

What better opportunity is there going to be for building canals and a water reservoir? I started digging a ditch towards the sea, reinforcing the walls as I went. The beach rises away from the sea, but the ditch needs to slope down. That way once the water reaches the ditch it will gush quickly towards the reservoir built higher up the beach. That means a lot of digging, exactly what I wanted.

The tide and my ditch met about an hour after I started. I looked at it from the side, as the first wave kissed the entrance to the ditch. The entrance started crumbling, as it was designed to – the walls would need to hold up but the entrance would crumble. The second wave broke through and flowed into the ditch, but all it did was make the ditch wet. The next few waves did the same, saturating the sand. I was cheering each wave on, willing it to make it to the reservoir and then finally, about a minute in, a wave entered the wet ditch, rolled down and reached the reservoir. With the next few waves the reservoir filled with water through the ditch and the water was starting to surround the walls too, which were holding up. From the city wall the ditch, the reservoir and its walls looked like a peninsula which was slowly becoming an island.

My waterworks stood for another fifteen or so minutes until they were completely gone under the water. After six hours, the beach would once again look like a clean slate and no one would ever know that someone spent one of the best 60 seconds of his year there just a few hours before.