Jonathan Dodd‘s latest column. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
It’s usually so quiet. Today I can hear people weeding their vegetables, and someone’s doing some drilling quite a distance away, but still, it’s the sounds of the birds and insects that dominate my aural environment. It’s a Saturday. During the week I set my mobile phone to record and left it on for over a minute and all I recorded was birdsong.
Most of the birds here are familiar. In the evenings there are swifts as well as swallows, and I can hear a dove above me in an olive tree. There are blackbirds and sparrows and chaffinches. The insects are different though. There’s a particular kind of brilliant blue bee, super-sized and looking like a battlebee or a miniature helicopter, armoured and indestructible, with a deep bass drone. I’ve been trying all week to get a proper photo of it.
Teenagers!
We have a fat fluffy almost full-size young blackbird, which just stands in one place looking gormless, and a busy male blackbird scurrying around, pulling up worms and anything else he can find, then rushing back to shovel the whole lot down the young bird’s gullet, over and over while it just sits there. It reminds me so much of all the people I know with adolescent (or older) children…
There are two dragonflies that circle the pool, even when we’re swimming in it, buzzing over our heads and close enough to touch if they would let us. They’re friendly but not foolhardy. We can hear the flutter of their wings. A couple of wagtails strut round the edge of the pool, suddenly dipping down over the water to catch insects on the surface.
Who let the dogs out?
We have orange trees with oranges on them, olive trees, pomegranates, and many others I can’t recognise or remember. There are innumerable vividly coloured flowers, and a huge palm tree going straight up about 15 metres, with a colony of argumentative chaffinches near the top, diving down off it and swooping among the tree branches.
In the town there are dogs loose. We don’t know if they’re owned or feral, but they wander around, crossing the roads at will. We should have them in England, because everyone drives really slowly and safely as a result. Apart from those usual young men with loud exhausts and stereos, who are immune to persuasion or advice. The most frightening thing is being overtaken by them on narrow windy mountainside roads with steep drops to one side and just a flimsy-looking barrier.
As blue as a very blue thing…
I love driving abroad in local left-hand-drive hire cars. I love the sheer terror of trying to remember which side of the road to stay on, reaching for the gear lever with my left hand and encountering the door instead, and the roundabouts, geometrically opposite to what I’m used to. The roads in town can be so narrow that you think you might get stuck between the walls. By contrast the clean sweeping motorways flow majestically through rocky hillsides covered with olive trees, sometimes clinging on up impossibly steep slopes. The sky is sky-blue, and about as blue as it’s possible to imagine blue could be, and the air in between is clear and crisp.
We spend most of or time collecting an indirect tan while sheltering from the relentless sun under a wide roof, reading and listening to music, and we can look up and see snow on the peaks of the Sierra Nevada. It’s surreal. The gardens around us are watered via a system of buried pipes with pop-up sprinklers that suddenly turn on and wake us from whichever reverie we’re in the middle of. They operate zonally in timed sequence, a few at a time, and gradually the circular sprays move down to the far end of the garden, until it goes quiet again.
Back to childhood
I’m remembering my childhood again vividly, because it’s so quiet and there’s absolutely nothing I have to think about or do, just like those long summer days on holiday from school. We wake up when we wake up, and we don’t have to get up, just like it was when I was a student. I haven’t felt this relaxed and placid for decades.
It’s wonderful here. This is what a holiday should be. We arrived here with all our batteries running on empty and I feel like we’ve plugged ourselves into the wall and we’re getting charged up again. Ready for the return to normality. Until the next time.
If you have been, thank you for reading this.
Image: Maximo Lopez under CC BY 2.0
Image: Bob Peterson under CC BY 2.0
Image: Candiru under CC BY 2.0
Image: Sean R Nicholson under CC BY 2.0
Image: Daniil Vasiliev under CC BY 2.0
