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.