Its lovely writing to you whilst Im 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 dont have sunsets over Meadow Lane, but its just that Ive
been mulling over a sort of truism this week: you dont have to be here to
drink and you dont have to drink to be here. Rick
thinks hes discovered another Eden. They do Yorkshire pudding with gravy
in a café near where were staying and I kid you not that its
called Fatsos. 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 (Fatsos, 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
owners permission, of course) and chatted with a couple who eloped here
from Accrington fifty years ago when she was seventeen. You couldnt 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
worlds 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 Ill 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, thats
just what Im going to do. Next week I will write
from Meadow Lane with an overall view of what its 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.
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