My obsession with sandcastles | Steve Canavan

And the weird thing is this: I’ve got right into it. By ‘it’ I mean building sandcastles.

There is something incredibly satisfying about digging up a load of sand and putting it into a big pile. Even I can build a castle out of sand so it makes me feel powerful. I step back from shovelling a load of sand into a heap and think, ‘yep, I did that – pretty damn fine’.

I’ve grown in confidence too so that each day I’ve started putting in extra touches, like a moat, a circle of sandcastles around an outer wall, and an en-suite double bedroom in the east wing and an outdoor tennis court.

Don’t tell anyone, but I’m enjoying building these sandcastles way more than any 44-year-old man should.

Even Mary is bored by it and spends her time looking in rock pools for crabs or throwing a ball around, while I complete my latest design.

The best part about it is waiting for the sea to come in and wash it away. There’s something quite thrilling about building a big moat around your castle in a bid to thwart the sea, but knowing deep down the inevitable will happen and your hours of hard work will be demolished by the incoming tide.

Again, my daughter doesn’t seem as excited by this as me, so while I’m standing next to my castle brandishing a spade and desperately trying to rebuild the defensive wall with the waves lapping around me, Mary is on a nearby rock with her hand on her chin, fed up, and saying, ‘dad we can go home yet? We’ve been here six hours now’.

Carried away by my new hobby, I briefly pondered quitting my job and becoming a professional sandcastle builder – making a living travelling around the UK, going from beach to beach making castles, while a crowd of admirers gathers round to watch and coo in appreciation.

But then, on my arrival home, I made the mistake of googling sandcastles and discovering the world’s biggest, in Germany, stands at a height of 57ft 11in . To put that into context, a double decker bus is 14ft high, so it’s four of them on top of each other. That’s high.

It was built in 2019 and took – and here’s where they had an advantage over me – a team of 12 sculptors and eight technicians working eight hours a day almost four weeks to complete.

Quite what the point of it is I do not know, but it’s got the town of Binz in the Guinness World Records and presumably helped boost tourism. It’s still standing now, and you should have a look at a photo of it – it is quite something.

There’s clearly something in the water – or the sand – in Germany, for it is there that the world record for most sandcastles built in an hour was set. A chap called Kabel Eins constructed 2,230 individual sandcastles in 60 minutes.

The completed castles had to be at least two feet high. That’s some achievement, although he must have been washing sand out of his hair and flip flops for months afterwards.

It puts my paltry efforts into perspective but, undeterred, I’m going to keep on building.

So if you happen to wander down a beach and see a sweating middle-aged man constructing an intricate moat system while his bored-looking three-year-old daughter sits sulkily nearby tutting and shaking her head, you’ll know who it is.

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