PRETTY IN THE CITY

The start of any new affair is exciting, but the start of an affair during a storm is explosive. I’d wanted you for so long, and then I finally got you, and the first time was during a violent storm. It was like nature had supplied a five-dimensional soundtrack with rumbles and thrusts and flashes and moaning. We could never quite coincide: you were always with somebody when I was single, and when you were single I was with somebody. Do you remember those late-night sessions, as the drugs wore off and people couldn’t quite look each other in the eye anymore… except for you and me.... ...But then came the storm. Now it’s 3 a.m. and I’m lying in bed alone, listening to rain and thunder and I smile to myself. Maybe I’m more normal than I think.

Anyone who knows me knows that one of my favourite young-adult fiction novels is The Beach. So, as a staunch admirer of that book, you can imagine that I’m always interested in the notion of a secret beach. So there I was, innocently enjoying a souvlaki and a large pint of a local, quite disagreeable beer called Mythos - which is anything but mythic, but which I always seem to drink when I’m in Greece - when some guy started telling me about a secret beach on the island. He said (and I’m fairly sure he’s said this line to a lot of girls, and I have to admit it worked a treat) that every single year the locals take down the signs so that tourists can’t find it. Well, the next day, after making it clear to him that it wasn’t a date, I hopped on the back of his motorbike and went off to see this beach. And the way he was talking about it, I started to wonder if he’d also read The Beach, because he was describing how the sun hit this giant cliff that provided natural shade, and how if you swam underneath an underwater arch you ended up on the world’s smallest beach, completely unknown. Honestly, as far as he was concerned, it was Eden. Now, I know Greece. I know Santorini. There’s barely a plant on the place, so it was never going to be the Hanging Gardens of Babylon but still. ButI can confirm the following. One: the secret beach does actually exist. It wasn’t just a normal beach that he’d conned me into believing was secret. Two: there were no tourists on this beach. Three: the cliff really did catch the sunlight in a magical way and provided the promised natural shade. Four: it wasn’t quite an underground tunnel situation, but you did have to go for a short swim to find an even smaller beach, and it was a bit of an adventure and absolutely worth it. And five: he did indeed think it was a date, despite my having established already that it wasn’t. So I’ll end this little tale by saying that I’m afraid I can’t tell you where the beach is and the only pic I can give you is of the hotel gym. After all, it’s a secret!*   * I'm really intrigued to know if anyone else knows about this beach. 

I despise drugs, but if I come across a half smoked joint in an ashtray I simply have to smoke it. So there I was in a country house in the province of Girona. We'd been lying around for a couple of days in tracksuits, so we decided to get all dressed up and go into town. And so I dutifully got all dressed up - well, not all dressed up, but quite dressed up - and then as I was waiting for my friend I spotted this half-smoked joint in the ashtray and, according to the rule mentioned above, I had to smoke it. Turned out it was one of these newfangled super uber extraterrestrial semi-hallucinogenic things, because I proceeded to spend about an hour in the garden with the flowers, as you can see in the photo above. What's the moral of the story? ...Flowers are surprisingly good listeners.

A queen should travel in style… So as I looked around the ferry to Ibiza, I found myself asking why the hell I was surrounded by Brits on the piss... singing, unsavoury-looking children screaming, loud Americans being American, and Italian men being Italian. Yes, I know they’re stereotypes. But honestly? Everyone was behaving like they'd been cast to act their part. The latter were particularly offensive. The advantage of a plane is that everyone is forced to stare in the same direction. This ferry, however, allowed a group of young Italian men - early twenties - to park themselves directly opposite me. They’d already heard Naz and me speaking in English, so they assumed that, like most English speakers, we wouldn’t understand their language. They were wrong. I’m not fluent in Italian, but the languages I do speak allow me to recognise, pretty much universally, the vocalised appreciation of my breast tissue. Then a ferry employee... a purser, bosun, captain, who knows... made an announcement in that exact calm, rehearsed register pilots use when a plane starts dropping through turbulence. He explained that the sea was very choppy and was about to get choppier, and that anyone who felt sick would find a bag somewhere nearby - down the side pouch of the seat. I didn’t really listen. Come on, surely seasickness isn't a thing. And then two things started to happen. The undulation increased. And the sound began to decrease. If I had a graph, I’m sure it would show perfect concordance: the more the ferry bobbed, the more the volume dropped - until something completely mad occurred. Within ten minutes, an eerie hush fell over the entire space. Not silence - obviously - but compared to what had just been happening, it might as well have been. The children lost all their energy. The Italians started looking at each other, making the odd joke that no longer seemed to amuse them. An American looked green. The Brits stared at their beers, reconsidering their choices. And then it began. People staggered out onto the deck, clutching their bags (thank God they went outside with them.) So yeah, I never really believed seasickness was a thing. It is! And frankly - as far as I’m concerned - if it shuts people up… it’s no bad thing at all. And there my tale should end, but the confounded universe had to punish me for this moment of charitable deficiency. As you can see from the graphic accompanying this post,  within 12 hours I ended up bent double driving the porcelain bus myself. What's the moral of the story? Puke unto others as you would puke unto yourself... or something like that.