It was a warm evening, an embracing air – the kind of air that holds you close.  “Envolvente” was the Spanish word I used to my wife – I don’t know if in this context correctly.

One of the problems of not being a native speaker of a language is that when you try to be creative, try to be poetic, you are sometimes accused of simply being wrong.

We decided to go to the hotel bar, about twenty gentle minutes walk away.  The local municipality had paved a cycle-path and pedestrian way a couple of years before, duly lighted with bleeding-edge street lights.  So bleeding edge, in fact, that every year since, after fiestas that is, we find two or three of the lights in question shattered by the antics of playfully drunk young men and women.

The difference between Britain and Spain lies precisely here: in Britain the elite can smash and grab their way through tax avoidance and expenses’ scandals – and there is little it would seem anyone can do about it; the ordinary criminal, on the other hand, quite rightly in the wider scheme of things I suppose, gets away with nothing.  Quite rightly in the sense that they do deserve to be punished; not rightly in the sense that the elite generally receives no official disapprobation.

Meanwhile, in Spain, whilst the elite more or less act in the same corrupt and corrupting ways as the British have proved so good at pretending they do not, their children are allowed to blow off steam, get wildly weekendly drunk and – even – occasionally torch abandoned cars, without the heavy hand of the law coming down unequally on just some but not on others.

So in Spain, they often spread their criminality more thinly about.  In Britain, on the other hand, we like to concentrate the unpunishable sort for the benefit of the lucky few.

We walked up the pedestrian way hand in hand.  We could hear the crickets surprisingly nearby – though never visible to the eye.  In the distance, the muffle of dogs barking languidly to each other – a communication always hidden from our nosy and inquisitive ears.

We talked of family matters and reached comforting conclusions.

We comforted each other.

Old age is always a challenge – whether it be one’s own or another’s.

Then the hotel appears before us, to the left of the petrol station.  The sky is dark – the sun-coloured logo a strange moon of a curious state.

And so we walk up a little self-consciously to the entrance to the hotel bar; so many handsome young men and women sitting outside and talking that one almost forgets how one used to look.  But love is not the outside of a person.

Love is consistently and pervasively focussed on the truth.

And the truth is somewhere else.

Skin can be beautiful – but an ugly body doesn’t preclude affection.  We all deserve affection, whatever our stop and wherever we find ourselves on that journey which so disconcerts.

We order our coffees – mine in a glass.  It’s a sugary coffee – dark and deep.  I could live my life drinking coffee like this: I feel a little like a Mediterranean Inspector Morse; quite out of place, of course – his beverage was English beer; mine, instead, is coffee from Portugal.  They know how to make coffee in Portugal, they do.  They know how to roast it and sell it and give pleasure.

And here I am in a Spanish hotel bar, drinking coffee with this wife of mine who I am unable to reproach for absolutely anything.

On the way back, the children on their bikes whizz by at hurtling frightening speeds.  No one gets hurt, as is generally not the case; and I am reminded how Spain taught me not to fear the end of life.

Living in Spain was good for me.  It gave me a wife, children and a certain fearlessness.  Britain has drained the latter out of me.

It’s time to remind myself of its value.

It’s time, in fact, for another Portuguese coffee in that Spanish hotel bar where memories always surface.

Good night dear reader.  Good night dear soul.

I hope you can sense the happiness I feel, as I write these words tonight.