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Familiarity breeds contempt… aarrgh! What a meaningless and cheap sentence. Anyway, I haven’t been to Juhu Beach for ages and it’s not just because fat people cannot fit through the dividers to keep hawkers out (really, I could squeeze past if I wanted).

But where was the need? As kids in the last century (and I don’t mean like seven years ago), we had two views of Juhu Beach. Far far away, past Sun n’ Sand - the other shady hotels hadn’t come up yet - there were some private homes where you could get public access to the beach.

Great for some secluded swimming and eating nuts fresh from the badam tree and watching your mother and her friends pretend not to ogle at Kabir Bedi and Sanjay Khan who could be seen there sometimes. Okay not my mother (she’ll kill me) but her friends for sure.

The other Juhu Beach was the public one. When I was about eight, an uncle swept us off there without any other parental supervision, and it was far, far better than the secluded Juhu.

We travelled by train — a novelty — we ate pau bhaji and candyfloss till we were sick, rode the hurdy-gurdy, bought balloons and dipped our toes in the sea. All around us, Bombaywallahs frolicked with us. It was a heavenly day.

Last week, I went to Juhu Beach again after about 15 years. It was a bit surreal. The sky was filled with weird monkey-shaped balloons, which in the fading light looked like some imminent alien invasion or Planet of the Apes or Hitchcock’s The Birds. The food stalls had been packed into one end, a mad cacophony of eat this, eat this, eat this.

On the beach, you were attacked by hawkers (very thin ones, since they got past the barriers) - do you want a mehndi tattoo, a corn on the cob, water chestnuts? The tide was coming in, so there was not much beach between the vendors and the stalls at that end.

The sea, fed up of the abuse, was throwing all the muck and garbage back onto the beach. The moon looked a bit fed up at the mess too and it lay sulking on its back.

The lessons are clear: The beach is a mess, youthful memories are a load of bunk and therefore better as memories and from now on, I’m better off being too fat to get through the barriers.

I don’t want to go back there again. And all those film stars of yore were too old for me then and are still too old for me now. You can have them. I’m looking for another beach. Murud Janjira?