10th Oct 04. Jimena de la Frontera.

Sunday morning. Outside the front door, double-size ants are manhandling chunks of vegetation up the path. Inside the front door, a large but not yet double-size man is eating anchovy pate sandwiches for breakfast. Augustus Pablo bumps away in the background thanks to the miracle of the iTrip, which turns the iPod into a miniature radio station.

This is my last week in Europe. The flat I've rented for a week - for a bargain rate - is the most chilled out place I've stayed in so far. Last night I watched "Brief Encounter" with a cat and some cheap wine.

As always, belly-laugh followed belly-laugh until we were both exhausted and the cat, still hiccuping with mirth, begged me to order it a taxi.

At last! At long, unholy LARST I've got a front door with a hatch in the top half.

This means I can lean out and shout "Hola"'s, and, later in the day, drunken threats to passers-by, but -crucially- it means I can do it with no trousers on. It's the rural equivalent of being a newsreader.

11th Oct.

I'm so relaxed I can scarcely be arsed to breathe. My daily routine in Jimena is as follows.
1. Wake up at 4am following a Lariam induced dream, this morning's involving inappropriate defecation. Go back to sleep.
2. Wake up at 5am to the resonant sqwawking of a cockerel somewhere in the valley. If I had to get up at 7 and go to work this would become increasingly upsetting, but I don't. Go back to sleep.
3. Wake up at 8.30 to sun streaming in through the blinds. Yawn. Maybe scratch. Go back to sleep.
4. Wake up at 9.30. Actually get out of bed and make "Cowboy Coffee" - i.e. filter coffee without the filter, using two mugs and a sieve. Combine with landlady's marrow and ginger jam and a fag for the ideal breakfast.
5. Ablute at a pace a snail would find irritating.
6. Buy bread at the baker's, all of two minutes walk away.
7. Clamber aboard the hog and belt around the hairpins for an hour.
8. Eat more food. Maybe drink a bit of beer.
9. 3.30 - siesta time.
10. Repeat stage 7.
11. Repeat stage 8 until bedtime.

It's all so easy and good that the horsefly of guilt occasionally buzzes around my flanks. It's the job of seconds to flatten it with a lazy swat.

The high point of today is knee-bucklingly good tapas at a bar down the hill, washed down with freezing cold San Miguel. At first I sit outside and realise I'm sitting next to a table of UK expats. For a few minutes I think it'd be nice to have a chat, and then I hear one of them use taxi-driver code for "I am a complete tosser - stay away", i.e. "I'm not being racist, but..."
45 minutes of sour, bigoted, Daily Mail-reading crap on the subject of immigrants follows. They're talking about UK immigrants of course. Not people who move to Spain. That's entirely different. If you took the trouble to read the Mail a bit more often you'd know that.

12th Oct 04. Jimena-Gibraltar-Jimena.

Hang on - my mum's got an exam tomorrow and I'm pottering about like a retired person. Has the world finally eaten the towel, thrown up its chips and run stark shouting mad?

Gibraltar. It's only a rock we rule, but I like it. Like it. Yes I do!
Gibraltar is so wrong it must be right. British bobbies on the beat; but we're driving on the wrong side of the road. Proper traffic lights with a commanding presence in the thoroughfare; yet it's 82f in mid-October. Grimaces all round when I try to pay for my chorizo sandwich with Euros.
It's like a not-quite-right British theme park in California. Or one of those novels where someone else won WW2 and Gib's all thats left.

Blimey! I just got a smile out of the barmaid. Up until now she's had a face like a morosely-dispositioned horse that has woken on Monday morning to find itself at the nadir of a bipolar cycle. With a sore throat. Cheer up love! It might never ha... Oh... I see that it already has...

It is the hour of the warm glow, my friend. I've just met some lovely, nice, unbigoted, happy English people from the Midlands. They, like me, were a touch the worse for wear re. drinksh, but their enthusiasm for Spain shone through the booze mist like, er, a fog-light or something.