Twins: Ten Thousand Letters To My Children

North of Malta and south of Gozo lies the small island of Comino and its own satellite, Cominetto. Between them is a spit of white sand, a rocky corridor of low cliffs and a shallow inlet of clear water. This is The Blue Lagoon. Brooke - meet flamingo. But all is not well in paradise; the terribly awful 1980 Brooke Shields' vehicle of the same name was filmed here. But nowhere in the story will you find her paddling her inflatable flamingo between flotillas of giant day trip boats, battling swarms of sunburnt tourists or suffering the cross-legged indignity of a half kilometre queue for a porta-loo. If there was a 1980's burger van selling deep-fried Spangles, it stayed firmly behind the camera. The channels between the four islands are barely a mile wide and so, after breakfast, it was a short hop from St Paul’s Bay, around the north-eastern headland and into the inlet. Finding little room to park the boat and even less prospect of somewhere to sit on dry land...