letter from spain

Here I am trying to look cool in the middle of an extended hot flush on the magical and sweltering Balearic island of Mallorca, off the south coast of Spain. I’ve been here a week now, revising the first draft of the new novel. Dog-sitting for old friends who’ve escaped the sun for Scotland. In high summer, southern europeans crave rain.

I’ve been drifting around their beautiful light-filled house pretending it’s mine while doing my best impersonation of a contemplative devil-may-care divorcee in an Almodovar film. Twice a day I walk Bruno, the Spanish waterdog. His temperment is placid and mild as the Med. Earlier this week I took him to the dog beach just outside the city centre. It’s directly under the Palma airport flight path. For half an hour I backstroked across the bay and watched an EasyJet/Whizz Air/Eurowings convoy roar in, delivering visitors from Stockholm, Berlin, London, New York and LA. There are prettier places to swim in Mallorca but the dog beach was weirdly exhilarating, like a scene from a Douglas Copland novel. It was the sort of place I’d have loved in my early 20s, back in the late 90s, a time when we actively craved bleakness and futurism, any kind of shock or tonal shift. The world seemed so safe and tedious then. We were constantly wondering when the grown ups would leave so we could get the party started. We were waiting for the sexy robots to arrive. We were so bored we thought, Anything’s better than this.

*coughs*