I worked out that they were a couple who had brought along their friend, the bespectacled hipster, in an attempt to take his mind off things. The tall, plain girl had concocted an itinerary, which she spelled out item by item, pointing out the places to visit on a map of the island. Somebody had died: it seemed to have been the girlfriend of glasses-man, because he was talking angrily about the father of his late sweetheart – a conservative member of parliament whom he called the Super Prick – and about his attitude at the funeral. It seems he had used the ceremony as he would a garden party, making his way from group to group, flanked by a waiter who was handing out glasses of champagne, trying to extricate himself and his son from the morass of their legal difficulties. Then there was talk of an earthquake in Nepal. They mentioned towns I’d never heard of. While the couple, who appeared to be involved in humanitarian work, were talking about a sanitation disaster, the one who had lost his girlfriend bitterly quoted the law of deaths to kilometres: the further away the event, the more victims are required in order to stir the interest of a minimum number of people. Nobody had given a shit about the earthquake in Nepal with its hundreds of victims – his chick among them – crushed under tonnes of rocks.

For whatever reason, I fell asleep with two lines of Philippe Muray’s ‘Tomb for an Innocent Tourist’ ringing in my head:

There’s nothing so beautiful as a blonde tourist
Right before her head falls off in the jungle.

My father had sent his mate Fañch in his Renault 14 to fetch me from the boat. Fañch threw my bag into the back and hardly had I plonked myself down in the passenger seat before he started giving me grief.

‘You know, he’s old, your father, he won’t be having too many more birthdays, you have to come more often, otherwise one day you’ll regret it . . . And when you do come, stay for longer and bring your daughter with you . . .’

It’s crazy the way this community tries to slip leg irons on you every time you come home, I thought to myself.

‘He told you he was missing me, is that it?’ I gave it right back to him. He grumbled something in reply, his florid drunkard’s conk buried deep in the fur of his spaniel, who was perched between him and the steering wheel. And then he was silent.

It must be said that everybody has an opinion on what we shall call the topic of Blanche on this pebble of an island, where everybody feels responsible for everyone else’s kids, if only because in that environment, shut off from the rest of the world, they all grow up right under your nose, so nobody is indifferent to the topic of Blanche.