Griff, who always read the guide books for weeks before we ever booked anything and memorised town plans, major street names and sights worth seeing, knew from the Rough, the Blue and the Let’s Go that Zakopane had a past. Poland’s well-heeled metropolitan consumptives had secured the town’s reputation as a fashionable health resort in the 1870s. These were followed by artists and intellectuals from Kraków, their bohemian colony thriving long into the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Then came the skiers, followed by the walkers and climbers. It was the arty connection that had finally sold it to Griff, who’d come to think of himself as one of a new breed of intellectuals since he’d won the chair at an important regional eisteddfod. And I suppose I knew, too, that he’d memorised the names of the bars, saunas and cruising areas mentioned in Spartacus and that Griff wanted to add a Pole or ten to the list of foreign nationals he’d knelt before.

For as long as the weather had remained warm and sunny, Zakopane and its surroundings hadn’t disappointed us; we’d come to walk in the mountains and we’d done six hikes in as many near perfect days. We could tick off the Rysy, the Copper and the Sunburnt Peaks, the Upper and Lower Frogs, the Ox Back and The High One; names, unpronounceable in Polish, that conjured up the myths and legends of the highlanders who’d once lived on their slopes. On the shore of Czarny Staw, the Black Lake, resting after a hard climb, I’d taken Griff roughly, almost violently, on a smooth, sun-warmed slab of granite. Swimming, afterwards, and bathing one another in the ice-cold water, our cocks shrank to a size that even Gwyn, for all his exaggerating, could only have mocked. On another afternoon, in a high Alpine meadow, deep in the folds of a tumbling sheet of yellow mountain leopard’s bane, Griff held me to the ground and pushed deeply into me; in the peace that came after sex we lay in one another’s arms and watched a golden eagle circle on a thermal. They’d been good days. In the evenings we’d eaten at the Watra or the Jerus, drank coffee in street cafés and only much later gone to Janina’s bar to sip iced vodka and flirt with the two waiters, Leszek and Jakub. Neither had played hard to get.

The mist and rain had begun to fall into the valleys of the Tatras on the eighth day, and Zakopane winced under the burden of a swirling damp that pressed its rooftops low. I’d read for most of the day while Griff cruised the park and cottaged in the public toilet by the bus station. In the late afternoon we’d met for coffee and sticky pastries in the hotel lounge. Griff’s bit of rough in the bushes had left him feeling chilled, however, and he soon left to loll in a hot bath. I stayed in the lounge to eat just one more sticky pastry and wonder what we might do for the remaining days if the weather didn’t improve. Licking my fingers clean of the syrup from the pastry my eye was caught by the questioning gaze of a striking older woman whom I took, from the elegance of her dress, to be German. As she walked towards me, I realised that all the tables in the lounge were occupied by groups of hotel guests, their plans frustrated by the weather, sharing anecdotes: The regal architecture of Kraków… The excitement and sheer terror of the raft ride through the Dunajec Gorge… The rickety local buses… When she asked if she might join me at my table her American accent, though surprising my earlier assumption, made me relax.