“Tiene café aqui?” I asked.
“Of course we do!” came the surprised response.
I looked at Fifi whose eyebrows had travelled sceptically northwards: “Well, that’s news to me” she suggested. “I’ve never had a coffee here – I just didn’t think they did it.”
“Sure, I mean, where’s the machine after all?” I said looking around. Nada.
I asked for a descafeinado. “But” I said, “Will it really be descafeinado?”
“D’jes – of course!” replied our lovely waiter; “I will make it myself!”
Unsure whether that would be the difference between up all night and just pleasantly sleepy, I threw caution to the winds: “Okay” I said, “Let’s do it!”
The Cortado arrived. The arresting image of a mouse’s face, or was it a cat, stared up at me. He was smiling, but the shape of his eyebrows suggested he had something on his mind, indeed that he was concerned, perhaps even worried. Spots where there could be whiskers – but weren’t – surrounded his dot of a nose, and his eyes – two circles surrounding pupils which wandered in alternative directions. To be fair, this arresting apparition looked like he’d had a late night, or perhaps, not even slept at all.
“Ooooh, he’s sooooo cute!” I exclaimed to our man. “Do you have a maquina to make him?”
“Yo!…Yo! He grinned. “I am the maquina, the machine!”
We all laughed. A laugh fortified by a bottle of Juve Y Camps and insightful conversation with my lovely chum in our favourite place to eat.
I sipped the Cortado: delicious. In fact the best I’d had so far five days into my break from urban living.
Declining postres, we paid up and made our way to the carpark.
“You know, considering I’ve had a fair amount of Cava, I just don’t feel tiddly at all – must have been the steak. Wow. I really needed some red meat.” I said, sliding the door shut with maybe more vigour than required.
Arriving back home, we were met by A who slowly walked with me towards my cabin in the woods. We talked of astrology, science and Human Insight. “I will look it up tomorrow” I said to A, “It sounds fascinating!”
My head hit the pillow and I was out like the proverbial light.
Two hours later, I woke with a start. What was that shuffling noise? Was it my bicycle moving? Was it a mouse? Were the Balearics home to Badgers? I didn’t think so.
Eyes wide open, I stared up into my eye mask. They remained that way until the cocks started crowing and the peacocks screeched their greeting to another day under the pines. I looked at my phone: 6am.
My head was buzzing with astrological conundrums; the rights and wrongs in life; the things to do and not do; energies flowing and not flowing; musings on my generation – and most particularly on our shortcomings.
Usually slow to rise, I leapt out of bed two hours later, completely wired.
Descafeinados on holiday, it turns out, continue to escape me.
I texted Fifi: “No wonder that ‘mouse’ looked worried. It’s true – our restaurant doesn’t do coffees; they do rocket fuel: I should get five chapters written this morning.”
I made breakfast in five seconds, and started to write.
“Seriously? You have a bath and a kettle in your room?” I said to new 
From Toulouse to Gaillic: Graffiti decorated station buildings, small maintenance boxes and animal sheds strewn in the fields we slowly pass, stamped with the mark of ‘I was here’ in street art language.
I’ve long been fascinated by graffiti and street art – from days of New York living where the subways trains rattled past spray-painted with a thousand colours. By whom, I used to wonder, and when and how? The mystery of incognito people decorating vehicles and walls in the dead of night or when no one was looking intrigued me.
Conversations with Strangers 