Out in the City: I so needed the beach to just escape from it all

I'd been having brunch with two gay friends, Tom and Anthony, at Kitchen and Pantry. And even though I'm normally rather brilliant and witty, today they were the ones coming out with all the pithy one-liners, like a rather deuxième gay version of Sex and the City.

As they are now going out together they were also making me feel uncomfortably and desperately single. For God's sake, I'm meant to be the sassy narrator. But they shut up when I announced that I had to go home and pack for a week in the Maldives with my housemate Willa.

My escape to the beach couldn't come too soon. My mother was throwing open the doors of the ballroom of the London house she occasionally shares with my cancerous father to celebrate his return from another post-radiation therapy sojourn at a monastery he likes outside Rome. I'd only seen my father once over the summer, and that was the first time in six years, and only because he'd written claiming he was dying. Perhaps he is.

Long before I'd run away from home, I'd discovered that the family house — a vast, neo-Gothic Victorian ecclesiastical palace on the edge of the City — is built on a graveyard. (They'd built it there as Holborn Viaduct was being rammed through.) And this discovery was something I deemed appropriate as life there had been one built on fear. Fear of paternal mood swings and of the unkindest of words and of aggression.

I don't approve of my mother even being in the same room as my father — it's a bone of contention that I couldn't wholeheartedly stand underneath the chandeliers and play happy families with two parents who were too self-involved ever to have noticed their child's depression.

But I'm done feeling sorry for myself. Life's too short. Later the next day, I was easing myself into island life on the Indian Ocean, I could hear Bob Dylan playing and Willa was by the sea standing with silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair. She may be female and my housemate but I suddenly felt content with the world, loved and appreciated and no longer lonely.

The anxiousness was dissipating as the sound of the call to prayer wafted over the sea from a neighbouring island. Home is where the heart is, right?