We recently visited my wife Penny's family in Australia, where I was confronted with a variety of environments that were particularly un-wheelchair friendly. Unfortunately, they were the places that make the country so beautiful - the bush, Sydney harbour and, most of all, the beach.

The beach is a difficult place for me. It is an environment that I used to love. In the past I spent quite a bit of time swimming and surfing regularly, if pretty badly. After years of British beaches, my first Australian beach was a revelation. The surf was bigger and stronger, the sun hotter and the amount of empty sand very inviting.

But negotiating sand in a wheelchair is all but impossible unless the beach is uncharacteristically hard and the wheels fat and rugged. I have tried many times to make it work. It would be lovely to build sand castles with Rosalie and paddle in the shallows together.

Although I hadn't written off the possibility of getting back out on to the beach in some form in the future, I became increasingly dispirited at the prospect of a trip to the ocean. It was difficult to settle for sitting in a car park with a book and a bottle of factor 30 while Penny took Rosalie for a splash after which she insisted on looking for shells or seaweed to “take to daddy”.

I found a great solution to the beach problem, however, when my father-in-law took us to a spot near Geringong on the south coast of New South Wales. We were presented with a seawater “beach pool”, (part rock, part concrete), full of fish, seaweed and pebbles but also as calm as a swimming pool - except at high tide, when it was hit by crashing Pacific waves.

Aside from providing a rare opportunity to swim, the added bonus was a promontory of flat rock that reached out around the pool. It was full of rock pools and the surf thrusted arcs of sea-spray over it. Although it was an intrepid push, it was just about wheelchair accessible and I could take Rosalie to look in rock pools at crabs, and we could hold hands and scream when the spray crashed over us. We left feeling exhilarated, and I realised that I had I found the perfect solution - a beach with no sand.

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