The car became our protective bubble, intimate and intense, just the two of us, simultaneously inside and outside.

And whatever secrets lay between us, when submerged, ceased to exist.

The Campsite

Hippie types, retired people, procrastinating students, debt-dodgers, and us. Like I said to him, the site was perfect and we’d nabbed the best view of the sea before the tourists descended like a plague for the summer.

It was a large site on a hill and we were tucked away at the bottom so there’d be no campers gawping at what we were eating and whispering their verdict, thinking we didn’t know they’d got nothing better to talk about.

Stanley said the sea looked like frothing blue beer. I took the hint and sent him up to the bar to get some.

So there we were, sitting by the sea. ‘Spain smells differently from England,’ he said with the kind of profound gravitas reserved for someone who’s just discovered the theory of relativity. ‘The heat, roasting chickens, campfires, grass, fresh fish in town.’

‘’Course it does,’ I said, pointing my finger northerly. ‘Countries that don’t smell are the ones to avoid. Clinical equals bland equals bloody fascist.’

‘You mustn’t generalize,’ he said, adopting his banker-speak. ‘No one nation is homogeneous, no matter what its PR machine says. Did you know there were black people in sixteenth-century England and eighteenth-century France, par exemple? Who knows what’s in the genes of your average Frenchman or Briton today?’

I really didn’t know how his mind worked. Where did that come from?

‘Oh, homegenoff, you big show-off.’ Then I massaged his limp little self, and he said I always knew how to shut him up, in the nicest possible way.

We slowed down to a full stop.

Months of hedonism do that to you.

Summer on the Coast

Like a dusty, ramshackle field for refugees, the campsite slowly became littered with households turned inside out: self-styled kitchens with open-plan dining rooms cum through-lounges, hammocks slung between trees, portable showers hidden behind plastic sheeting, washing lines with dripping towels, swimwear and underwear standing in for the boundaries of garden gates. Cars, mobile homes, caravans, combi-campers, motorbikes, bicycles and tents were pitched higgledy-piggledy with no regard for town planning. The gentle murmur of spring was drowned out by the rush and drone of summer season traffic on the road below, which separated the campsite from the sea.

J Couldn’t have asked for a more gentle man than Stanley. Gives me no trouble at all. Summer was the best ever

S Well, we wake up at first light, spend all day on the beach, sleep when the sun goes down

J Still opens doors for me, walks on the gentleman’s side of the road

S To elaborate: I fall into this sun-drunken stupor during the day. At night, I barely recover