Summer Holiday - Part 2 - Majorca

After Italy we flew to Majorca where we hoped to get a bit of proper sunshine and some 'Us' time. In a more low key way, we were going to hook up with some other friends of ours; the everlastingly ebullient Frances and her family. The Canes are a long way different from the Willets (although both are much richer than us with loaded parents and mortgages of £0) in that they all dead normal, are hugely popular, love football, Big Brother, The X Factor, fart humour and so on. Of course the real truth isn't quite as simple as this but this is the broad picture.

We stayed in a Finca - a converted Farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. Miles from the nearest beach or town it was quiet and had a pool. The joke was our room - see cell like view above - which turned out to be haunted...

To put this into perspective, I have never stayed in a place before which was haunted for me. Other people may have said, 'I think this place is haunted' or 'There's a ghost here' and I will have replied 'Sure' or 'Really?'. Whilst thinking, maybe it is and maybe it is not. Leaning heavily towards the NOT. It took me and wife a couple of nights to figure it out: The fact that we both woke at exactly the same time every night, around 3am. It would get suddenly very cold. There would be the sense of things coming in through the above window and then the feeling of disquiet, of there being a presence in the room. A presence that did not like us. My wife felt it absolutely the same as me and thus we would lie in bed, joking to each other until around dawn when the feeling would lift and we would get back to sleep. It quickly got to the stage where we would dread going to bed; to combat this we pulled the mattress into the living room where things, whilst still unsettling, were not nearly as bad. Luckily the children did not pick up on any of this stuff. I spoke to Pedro the owner about this who was not impressed 'No-one here has ever said anything before, mind you,' and here he gestured dismissively to the neighbouring finca which shared a structural wall with ours ' The Germans who live there think there are... Spirits? I think they believe that just because this land here used to be a Roman cemetery that there are ghosts! Ha!'
I think I said something about how pathetically obvious that was and that led onto a discussion about the foolishness of Germans in general. Not so foolish that it stopped them from owning half of your island, I was tempted to say. And that night me and Queenie locked the windows in some sort of attempt to keep out the angry Centurions, or whatever they were.

During the days it was hot - pretty much the only proper heat we got that summer of 2008. And we swam either in the pool which we mostly had to ourselves or in the sea once we managed to expensively park in someones cabbage patch down in one of the beach villages. To start with there were a lot of Italians on the farm with us; funnily enough they also had escaped from Northern Italy which, like us, they did not find warm enough. One evening, Pedro organised a meal/cultural get together in the yard outside. It could have been head clutchingly awful and/or embarrassing but in fact turned out to be one of the best meals of my life.

Unlike most Brits, these Italians seemed to be very unselfconscious. Within moments of sitting down, one of the men looked up at the stars, motioned all around him and pronounced 'Bella Atmosphera!'. Someone helpfully told me 'This means... Beautiful Atmosphere'. I replied that my Italian stretched that far - if no further - and the ice was broken.

Our children played with their children, hide and seek and games that children might have played on balmy summer evenings in England in the 1930s. The adults drank wine, ate lots of seafood and sang songs. We didn't know hardly any of the words, but we hummed along as best we could much to the unmalicious amusement of the others. Foreigners know so many songs off by heart! I can just about manage all of Rock N Roll Suicide by David Bowie but it doesn't compare with Amore! sung with gusto. All and all it was like the movie idea of what a big family meal in Tuscany should be like. To be make it perfect all was needed were a couple of nodding old crones dressed in black.

For 2 or 3 hours it was a glimpse perhaps of what life might have been like if ... I'd been a different person in a different country. When the final toasts were made, I proposed one to Italy and really meant it.

Los Angeles Christmas

Just come back from Los Angeles tonight. This was our mammoth (in turns of money) family Christmas trip to see Alice, Neil and Sofia. Alice is my stepdaughter who is now 25, is with Neil and has Sofia who is 3. I've been very lucky to have had Alice as a stepdaughter since she was 11, especially bearing in mind how fucked up and deranged some of her friends have been/are. Teenage girls on the whole - not a good thing. These older guys who fantasise about screwing young girls; are they mad? You might get a shag but then your head would be totally done in. Everytime they lost a T shirt, couldn't get into the bathroom or whatever it would be as if the world ended. And you'd have to express some sort of concern.

Alice, whom I pleased to say I never had a sexual relationship with, never gave me a hard time about anything. Sure, she was regularly transfixed with grief (for instance at the age of 12 she would cry because she wouldn't see how she could afford a mortgage later in life. Ha! Join the club, girlie. Then it would be the more usual things: Boys, careers, friends, skin care regimes) but she would mostly keep it to herself.

Anyway, she is still a worrier. Concerned about the past, worried about the present and scared of the future. Just like her mum, Alice is not one of these people who would say, "Oh, what the hell, let's put it behind us". Or, "Que sera, sera". Sofia is a sweet if er, assertive little girl and Alice is too worried to discipline her or tell her off particularly. As a notional grandparent, I worry about this. If normal teenage girls are bonkers I hate to think what one who is never told off will be like. Still, I was told off constantly and I'm not sure it made me a fantastic person or anything.

Los Angeles. But what is the point of it? I love films and the fact that most emanate from here is great but... L.A is a boring car infested dump. A million roads in search of a suburb, or something like that. Weather is quite clement for December in that it didn't rain all the time or was freezing all the time; having said that I went to bed fully dressed with 3 pairs of socks and was still cold. L.A apartments seem to mostly have these mad little gas heaters built into the walls which pump out choking carbon monoxide as soon as they are lit. So you worry alternately about being gassed or the place burning down. Easier to freeze.

Mostly everything seems selfish. The cars everywhere with one person in them. The grim quest for tips if you are anyone handling money or providing a service. I had this horrible fantasy about being taken to casualty over there and in addition to having hand over all my credit cards, doling out a never ending stream of $1s and $5s to porters, nurses and administrators. And then the taxes! I picked up a couple of parking tickets, one for being in a resident only zone (shame the sign was half a mile away) the other for being in a cleaning zone for the wrong 2 hours that week (the traffic wardens spend more time in the streets at this time than the street cleaning wagons which race through at a steady 30mph). Anyway, these tickets - pay online and the buggers clobber you for tax as well. Buy anything in a shop, the price is never inclusive of tax; they hit you for that on the till. However, the thing that really got my goat was their bloody mobile phones.

We had a pay-as-you-go mobile over there which costs 20c a minute. OK you might say. But wait: You pay that for every minute someone calls you as well. And best of all, you pay that if someone even only rings you and you don't answer. Victor Meldrew, eat your heart out.

When we flew home I upgraded us all to premium economy for any extra £800. It's true, money can buy you love - or that's how it feels when you aren't with everyone else. One feels more secure, safer. The stewards are kinder, friendlier more jokey. There is a great sense of being able to relax. Fuck knows what it is like flying Upper Class. Maybe you get blown whilst having your scalp massaged by a Tai Chi master. Meantime you are fed foie gras and Krug is syphoned into your mouth by an ingenious pump.

You see I'm quite a nervous flyer. As much as I believe in past lives, I am sure I have previously died in a plane crash. I would not be surprised if I died in this life in a plane crash. I know what that particular terror would be like as the Jumbo plunged down in a flat spin, passengers screaming, moaning, praying. Before we went home I had this dream about flying where I was the only passenger in this luggage storage compartment which had no windows, but did have a big saggy sofa with loads of cushions. The carpet and everything was threadbare but it was very comfortable and luxurious in a way and I felt very relaxed as the plane bucked and dropped through various turbulences. Perhaps, what makes me feel anxious is the thought of dying anonymously in steerage; the cattle truck in the sky. A fatal plane crash in a nice seat is somehow preferable - that's the Leo in me, I guess. Whatever, everyone had a nice flight and enjoyed the experience. All I have to do is make more money for other similar insulating experiences. (My currency speculations eventually made me £2000 profit. Shame I lost loads more pissing about on the stock market like a complete dumb twat. Financial Stocks and the Credit crunch don't really go unless you do know what you are doing. Maybe it will all come good in the end. Pray for Vodaphone because that's where the not so smart money is now.)