(Note to self: don't google "bel ami" sans "maupassant" again)
These kinds of repetitions are so boring, and pile atop one another as age advances you, and I wonder if they’re the cause for my late grandfather’s propensity to silence. He literally partook in every conversation going, and saw no need to waste the breath.
The one I’m thinking of is “Ibiza’s so lovely outside San Antonio – you have to see it”. My response (in my head, I can’t summon the strength to say it out loud), is that even if the rest of the island is idyll itself, Thomas Moore’s wet dream and the greatest place on earth, you still have to get a BudgetJet flight full of morons, rogues, dimwits, Hogarthian hen parties and hedonist heathens (the wrong sort) there and back. Thus your dream trip is bookended by the sad and very loud reminder of what a high percentage of the western world is taken up by useless people. Red-necked chav hillbillies in a puke-stained football shirt. And their boyfriends. Sorry, but I’d rather spend my credit crunch crumbles somewhere genuinely celestial, where everything’s perfect and the cracks in the veneer are kept to quiet resentment behind ceramic staff smiles.
And if Ibiza seems beautiful, it’s purely by contrast. After 48 hours in the bowels of hell (the Ibiza Rocks hotel), fending off catcalls from every pot-bellied sphincter-faced regulation-shaved MUM-tattooed loser lounging on his balcony with nothing to do but contemplate his grim future, with only excursions to bars populated by drunken fools talking about sexual proclivities that (unsurprisingly) hover near the ‘rape’ end of the erotic spectrum, even Bigg Market would seem like Puerto Vallarta. Oh, and she might be your mum but he sure aint your dad, sucker.
So it’s no surprise that the Restaurant Sa Caleta in the tiny cove of the same name was heaven on earth.
The same overcooked steak I’d been eating all week melted on grateful taste buds that were being told by eyes and ears that took in beauty for the first time again that everything was all right. Chips cooked in the same way as every Union Jack-clad San An diner filled the stomach of a truly relaxed and happy man. The peppercorn packet sauce could have come straight from the Le Pont De La Tour. Red wine, my comfort blanket against the impending cattle flight home, tasted like the blood of Bacchus, as I stretched my tired legs under the table and felt my capillaries relax under salt water-tightened skin.
There’s a guy on the sofa next to me cleaning the windows of Eat. If only he could see what I’m writing.
