SATURDAY 25th JUNE Posted 3 weeks later.
Madremanya

Bright sunshine. Lunch with Liz & Chris at Ses Brises, Llafranc. What a lovely house, what a stunning location high on the coast just below the Faro de San Sebastiá overlooking the bay of Llafranc.

Von in the garden at Ses Brises

Almost as good a view as we have in Harlech — but not quite, although there’s a lot more sea action going on. Liz and Chris are leaving on Tuesday to drive Chris’s elderly Porsche 911 from the Costa Brava to … Calcutta, India, via Istanbul, Afghanistan (the safe part, he assures me) and Nepal. The car has been fitted with truck tyres for the journey, which is about 12,000 km / 7,500 miles. Personally I’d rather stay at Ses Brises.

A sleeping policeman carefully hidden in the shade in the village does in one second for Milo’s sunblind, which had taken me three hours to install.

The folly at Torre Ronsat

In the evening Shaunagh’s 50th birthday party at Torre Ronsat. Yes, it’s a folly. I pronounce it definitively. Champagne (none of yer Cava muck) in the olive grove by the folly to start. I meet a self-important man who works in a field I know something about, having written five books about it. He’s working on his first book which may be published by a well-known publisher. Or not. He is apparently far more important than me, and cuts me dead.

Ace of Spades window in the folly. Was it built out of winnings in a card game? Or was Hector Guimard involved?

Dinner for 90 with 10 people to a table, 9 tables.  I sit at Shaunagh’s right hand. There’s flattered I am! Talk to a woman about taking a dog on holiday. She points at Milo, lying next to Von at Crispin’s (Shaunagh’s husband) table. “That dog with that beautiful woman is on holiday too.” Feel absurdly pleased.

Crispin sailed single-handed across the Atlantic for his 50th birthday, and wrote an excellent book about it, Where The Ocean Meets The Sky. Doing his publicity tour, he encountered a pretty little local radio reporter who was getting rather too effusive about his achievements (Crispin is a good-looking, muscular 6’ 5” former Oxford rowing blue). Luckily Shaunagh was there to chaperone him, and the reporter just about managed to include her in her general excitement, bubbling at her “Did you ever in your wildest dreams think that your husband would sail the Atlantic single-handed?” Shaunagh fixed her with that basilisk stare we all know and love and stated “My husband does not feature in my wildest dreams.”

Get to bed at 02:30.

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