It’s lovely writing to you whilst I’m actually in Ibiza as opposed to dreaming about the pastel-blue skies and blood red sunsets and people who smile because they feel good with themselves.

Not that we don’t have sunsets over Meadow Lane, but it’s just that I’ve been mulling over a sort of truism this week: you don’t have to be here to drink and you don’t have to drink to be here.

Rick thinks he’s discovered another Eden. They do Yorkshire pudding with gravy in a café near where we’re staying and I kid you not that it’s called Fatso’s. This is within a distance from whence I reckon you could throw a black pudding and hit the Café del Mar.

We went in there yesterday (Fatso’s, I mean) and I saw one of those Ibiza tour reps that always seem to be on some channel or other at Midnight and she literally held the hand of this averagely-aged couple and showed them how to order bacon, fried eggs and beans from an English girl at the counter.

It did cross my mind that perhaps they were from somewhere other than the UK, and I was musing why they would be in there if they were, but then the man said: “But what about tomato ketchup”?

I meanwhile picked a fresh fig from a tree out in the countryside on the road to San José (with the owner’s permission, of course) and chatted with a couple who eloped here from Accrington fifty years ago when she was seventeen. You couldn’t make this up if you tried.

I met a sculptor who has this idea of doing bronze heads with gaping slashes in the sides and I listened as Gary organised the Ibiza History Culture staff party at Rias Baixas (still up there amongst the world’s finest fish restaurants) a few hundred yards from our office door.

And, wonder of wonders, I have discovered you can get Rizla liquorice papers here now as well as bottles of fruit-flavoured water.

Any day now I get to meet the other contributors again, including - for the first time - our two new ones, Harold Liebow and Martin Davies. Kirk W Huffman is apparently going to telephone us all from there from Vanuatu or wherever he is in the Southern Hemisphere and then I’ll be off again, this time via Madrid.

Just to complete the roll-call, Denys has now emailed me to point out that this train journey is not the most arduous part of the long haul home, but an opportunity to relax and rest and watch the Spanish countryside go by. Let the driver do the walking, or something like that she said.

And do you know, with a glass of iced water in one hand and an Atlas in the other this time, that’s just what I’m going to do.

Next week I will write from Meadow Lane with an overall view of what it’s like getting to and from Ibiza from the North of England by trains and ferries and I bet our American readers (and there are more of them every week) will be sick as the proverbial parakeet.

Sinclair Newton

The Ibiza History Culture Archive includes the complete and original versions of Artists on Ibiza, Anthropological Views on Ibiza, Ibiza's Bibliomaniacs' Corner, History of Ibiza, I Remember Ibiza, Island Ecology, Ibiza Local News, Sober Life and Commentary Features on the island of Ibiza.

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