It’s Sunday morning, I’ve got a coffee on my desk and I’m thinking about yesterday’s event.
The idea was pretty simple: bring a small group of people together somewhere beautiful, do a bit of good for the place, and then enjoy it. No big speeches or name badges. Just a bit of clean up, a sauna, a swim and a sunset. Which, naturally, meant I spent the week worrying about it.
I’ve been trying to build Love Our Island in public, which sounds very noble until you realise that a few negative comments can make you question yourself, your ideas and occasionally what you think you’re doing.
A week before the event it was fully booked. Excellent! Then people started dropping out. A few more joined. A few disappeared again. By Saturday, the numbers had settled somewhere around “well, at least it’ll be intimate”.
Paul and I arrived first with a portable sauna, two enormous tanks of water, snacks, litter-picking gear and enough bags of equipment to make us question the decision to put the event at the bottom of a cliff.
We lugged everything down, set up the sauna and then people slowly started arriving.
Once everyone had gathered, I gave a short talk about Love Our Island — where it started, why I’d created it and where I hope it goes. The basic idea is that it’s not really about picking up rubbish. It’s about changing the way we experience and take responsibility for the places we live in.
I gave everyone a litter picker and a pair of gloves and explained that I’d walked around the area a few days earlier and thought there wasn’t actually that much rubbish. I was wrong.
The closer we looked, the more we found and by the end we had a surprisingly sizeable pile of bagged rubbish. But the litter was never really the point. There are already plenty of people doing brilliant litter-picking work in Cyprus. I don’t want Love Our Island to become another litter-picking group.
I want people to connect with the experience of being somewhere. To make memories here. To enjoy the island while leaving it slightly better than they found it and hopefully spreading this message.
It was a lovely mix of people. A couple from Canada who were visiting Cyprus on holiday, someone who had only moved here a month ago, people born here or who’ve been here for years and a sustainability campaigner. Different lives and different reasons for being there, but for a few hours everyone was sharing the same little patch of coastline. Then came the sauna.
The sun was dropping, people were sitting on the rocks chatting and watching the sunset, others were going into the sea to cool off and the sauna was doing its thing beside us. It was exactly the sort of atmosphere I’d imagined when I first had the idea. Actually, it was better. There was something very simple about it. People together, enjoying an experience and doing something good.
My social media is full of people I’ve never met but somehow know quite well. Regular commenters, people I chat with and who follow what I’m doing and send me messages. I love that, but nothing really beats real-life conversation and connection.
As the sun almost disappeared completely, the sauna had to come down.
So, as people began to leave, Paul, a few others and I found ourselves clambering back up the rocky cliff in the dark carrying several enormous bags of sauna equipment.
We had a head torch, phone torches and, looming above us, a full harvest moon. It was hard work and completely ridiculous but it felt amazing. Because by then the whole thing was finished and we’d brought people together, cleaned the place, watched the sunset, swum in the sea, sat in a sauna and met people we probably wouldn’t otherwise have met. And then we left. No rubbish. No equipment. No trace.
I think there’s something in that for anyone trying to build something. You can spend a lot of time worrying about numbers. How many people signed up. How many turned up. How many people are watching. But sometimes the thing you’re building isn’t really measured in numbers.
Yesterday, a small group of people had a good experience together. Hopefully they’ll remember it, hopefully they’ll tell someone about it and hopefully they’ll come back. That feels like a pretty good start to building a real-life community.
I was nervous about doing the first experience and this morning I’m already thinking about the next.
If you’d like to be part of the next one, join the Love Our Island WhatsApp group — I’ll share details there when we’re ready.
Big shout out to Paul from 9 Waves for collaborating on this event and setting up the most incredible sauna experience and to Destream for sponsoring the event and supporting Love Our Island and helping it grow.