Out of season, in a tiny Andalucian mountain village, eating something yummy made with rice and bunny and drinking a rocket-fuel rosada while the bats start to swoop and the sun sinks showily over the Sierra Nevada, and I'm probably as relaxed as I have been for God knows how long, which isn't saying much, though attempting to shoehorn a summer's-worth of the stuff into a mere four days won't help, especially as I'm accompanied by the copy of Revolutionary Road that has been waiting on the bedside table at home for more than a year and which is now putting the "down" into "downtime": as a purveyor of American dream-breakdowns, Yates is obviously right up there with Updike and Ford, but as holiday reading it's not exactly Driving Over Lemons.
This year, not having had what one would describe as a holiday in the traditional sense, means that in a sleepy village in the high Alpujarras I am pursuing the concept of relaxation in much the same way as the man with the gun stalked the bunny on my plate. But I'm sure the silence is beginning to get to me and the cool evening air of the mountains will blow the psychological cobwebs away. And then there is the prospect of Granada tomorrow, because I like to check that the Alhambra isn't getting any uglier about once a decade, if possible.
Suddenly my ruminative relative peace is shattered by a squawk of English, voice raised into mobile phone. The reception is a bit hit-and-miss up here in the gods.
"Nah. Don't bovver. S'fine. Yeah. Bye!"
A vision of 80s glamour appears in my peripheral vision. She pauses, squints, wobbles a bit, says: "You English?"
"Yeah, 'fraid so…"
"I'm English!" Like I hadn't noticed. "Been here for years… I'm Sue, nice to meet you!"
"Hi Sue, I'm Kate. Er, lovely to meet you, too…" my faux cheeriness laced with lack of sincerity and chased with almost-total sobriety – I'm only one glass into the rosada, after all. And if she were any less drunk she'd probably see the words "please go away" tattooed across my forehead in capitals.
"Where d'y'live?" says Sue.
"Um, the south coast? Of, er, England…"
"How funny. I'm from there originally, but I've been here for years. Years!"
"OK…"
"Yeah, I'm from Random-on-Sea…"
"How funny..."
"D'you know Random?"
"I live there myself, actually!"
"Small world!"
The evening suddenly feels… potentially infinite?
"So," says Sue, "where d'y'live in Random?"
"Me? Oh I'm just off Arbitrary Street…"
"No! I used to live in Impulse Lane – just at the bottom of your road!"
At this point I am reminded of a cache of chance collisions and random coincidences (there not being any other kind, unless they happen in Random, in which case they're Random random coincidences), including that time, 18-odd years ago, when I bumped into a good friend at a cafe in a very small town somewhere in Mexico.
But you know what they say about coincidence? Try remembering all the times you haven't bumped into all the people you could conceivably ever have bumped into in all the places you have ever been – never mind all the times you've failed to meet people who once lived 100 yards from your front door, and that's pretty much the story of your life, really – along with not winning the lottery, despite never having bought a ticket.
Sue's phone rang again, for which she apologised profusely. As I'm sure I did too, while paying the bill and escaping.
The next day, at the Alhambra (no uglier, just busier, though still one of my favourite places on earth), I sat in the shade – 28C, cheers Allah – and recalled the context of my previous visits, spanning (coincidentally, yet obviously not) 28 years, and then I nearly bought the same postcard I always buy until I remembered I don't send postcards any more.
And then I suddenly felt exhausted at the prospect of the long and winding road "home" to bed somewhere on the other side of the Sierra Nevada, maybe because it felt too much like a metaphor? For which, rather unfairly, I decided to blame Richard Yates.★
