We go to the beach to seek the wild world. Everybody does.

We go to the beach because our souls have been crying out all year for release from the tame life of cities and commuting and jobs and the school run. We go to the beach to service our wilder selves.

If this was not the case, we would all go to New York for our holidays. But instead, we seek that touch of nature, that touch of the wilder world, because for all of us, a holiday is a completion.

It brings together our wild and our tame selves: it is both a reward for the past year and an investment that makes the coming year possible.

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We are accustomed to expressing this flight to the seaside in purely negative terms: absence of stress, change of scene, freedom from worry. But it is the positive aspect of all these annual trips that matter: a submission to the weather, a limitless horizon, the taste of the air, the islander’s pleasure of standing on the margins of the land, conversing with the great sea that covers most of our watery planet.

The pleasures of the wild are not restricted to those of us who can tell one bird from another. Everybody wants to spend a little time in a place a little wilder than the usual run of things. And the seaside is that little bit wilder than most people are aware of.

So there I was, halfway between beach and clifftop in Cornwall, escorting my older boy back to the top, pausing for breath, watching the matchstick figure below — and then, above their heads but dead level with ours, on a wild high-speed run, a jet-fighter silhouette, burly, dramatic, in sight for scant seconds before vanishing into the colony of kittiwakes and fulmars.

Peregrine. Peregrine falcon, perhaps the most exciting bird in the world, given to striking like a thunderbolt, with a butcher’s cleaver of a beak and a dashing little cad’s moustache. The fact that no one noticed but us gave an added value to the experience: we alone were able to see the invisible killer and, as a result, we alone understood the commotion among the kittiwakes, and saw the sudden white spume of the birds rising in panic.

It was on that same beach that, many years ago, I was enthralled by the life of the rockpools. I was 10 when we made the first family holiday to Cornwall and I still remember my incredulous joy at finding real sea anemones clinging to the walls, waving their floral tentacles.

I acquired a snorkel, borrowed from my friend Nick, and entered the rockpools as Alice went through the looking glass, discovering a strange, unlikely and rather alarming world. It was because of these silent journeys that I first became aware of the fragility of the world.

The oil tanker Torrey Canyon spilt its load all over the Cornish beaches, and it was as if our special beach had been its special target. They treated the spilt oil with detergent, which did more damage than the oil: and it was decades before the rockpools returned to themselves.

But now they are buzzing with life again, to give joy to my boys in their turn.

I will confess to a small stratagem. While I happily give myself up to fatherly duties on the beaches of Cornwall and Suffolk, I still carry in a belt pouch a pair of high-quality miniature binoculars. These can be brought into use with a Clint-like fast draw, for in any place with any touch of the wild at all, my eyes are always wandering.

It took me years to realise that if you learn to look about a mile off the shore in Cornwall, it is really quite easy to find gannets.

These mad, spear-billed, plunge-diving birds, 6ft-wide white wings with black tips, are wonderfully spectacular beasts. They don’t think much of the land, and only come on it to nest, but they will happily fish just beyond the reach of the human eye on the shore.

With binoculars to the eye, I can pick them out, and enrich the day. Last summer, looking at gannets from a pub overlooking the beach during a merry family gathering, I also found dolphins. With a shout, I shared them with everybody on nearby tables, and all my family got a good look at them. That was a wild day all right.

Beaches are full of life, and every visit to the beach is more vivid for a glimpse of something beautiful and wild: sand martins above what we humorously call “cliffs” in Suffolk, the terns a few yards out, paralleling the shore: the screaming of swifts above Southwold. Then there are the trips to sea as part of many beach holidays: the jaunt to seal colony at Blakeney Point, or that trip out on the bouncy boat in Cornwall from which we saw a half-dozen basking sharks, one a 12-footer.

We all go the beach because we are seeking the wild, but most of us are not consciously aware that we are doing so. It makes me go all evangelical: I want to encourage everyone to seek the wild consciously. You can do this with no more equipment than your eyes and your brain.

Look wild, think wild: and the wild world appears before your eyes like the most amazing conjuring trick ever performed. I will be back in Cornwall soon . . . wondering if there might be a repeat of that marvellous year when the clifftops were alive with clouded yellow butterflies.

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