I have nailed this Heathrow thing, I think, as I arrive at the airport at precisely the time I had planned, being precisely 2 hours before my flight, stroll into the priority check in, make one particular purchase from Jo Malone and buy my favourite guilty lunch (Leon’s fish finger wrap, I’m so English now) and then the gate is announced and I take my bulkhead row seat and peruse the menu (one meal, 9 hours? Jokers).
He scrawls his number on a card. “You have trouble, you call me, Alexandra.” (The Greeks love my name.) “Just call,” he urges, eyes crinkling around the edges.
Have I said this before? How wonderfully disorientating I find it to land in a foreign place after dark, not knowing what to expect when you wake the next day…
Today we step out into the bristling heat of Menorca, palm trees helping to set the scene. How did I get here?
Long overdue tales of whisky and water from the Inner Hebrides.
Apart from that, we shall eat and drink and shop. What’s French for ‘like, obviously’?
The setting was best described by Joey in her WhatsApp briefing message to me: ‘Get off at Chuisi. Ask for La Foce Villa. It’s huge. It’s ridiculous. It’s like an Agatha Christie novel.’
“D’you speak English?”
I turn around. Before me is a stereotypical American guy, about the same age as my dad, in a baseball cap and an Italian soccer shirt. I’m really very tempted to retort with a gallic shrug and a, “Non, je ne parle pas l’angalais,” but I don’t. I’m very clearly reading an English book and what if we’re stuck in this line for the gallery for ages and I need to ask someone something and have to do it in French?
A train to Tuscany, Neapolitan mermaid donuts, some mild self reflection.
In which I crush on rainy Italy.
An unsettlingly big place 