Two days later, on the following Monday, I was on a flight to Barcelona, with a one-way ticket. I hadn’t expected to be heading back to L’Escala so soon; my last trip to my Spanish hometown had ended calamitously, and that bad memory was still burned into my brain. The flight touched down late in the evening, so I spent the night in a hotel above Estacio Sants, the main railway station in Barcelona, and took a train north after breakfast. The house was cold when I arrived on Tuesday morning, just before midday. Anyone who believes that the north of Spain enjoys a year-long summer has never been there in the winter. My priority task was firing up the heating; that done, I unpacked, and then made the place habitable by moving the garden furniture out of the living room. By the time everything was as I wanted it, I was experiencing lunchtime symptoms, so I left a message on Sarah’s phone to let her know that I’d got there okay, and strolled down into the old town, the heart of L’Escala.
