DIARY
MINETTE MARRIN ast Sunday was my last day in the most idyllic place I can think of in Europe. We had been staying for three weeks in a beautiful rented house in Andalucia, north- west of Seville, in the sierras of Aracena, entirely surrounded by cork and sweet- chestnut forests, and looking across on all sides to mountains in the blue distance. It is as near perfection as a holiday house can get. There is room to have lots of guests, and there is room for them to escape from each other and from us. The light is very clear, the stars very bright, the days hot and the nights cool. Although the house appears to be in the depths of the country, there is an old-fashioned little town conve- niently close, with all the picturesque glam- our of backwardness, and Seville is only an hour away. For those who like their snob- bery inverted, the place is unfashionable, and to those who prefer their snobbery straight up, it offers the agreeable thought that not a single New Labour Cabinet min- ister has heard of it, still less dreamt of pol- luting it with his presence.
Iwas extremely sad to leave. It was hard to avoid feeling a touch of autumn in the heart, and something more intense than the usual sadness of the end of August: we were seeing, in our last hours there, the last rays of the last summer of the last century of the millennium. Anyone would have felt at least a little elegiac. I certainly did. Quite apart from the millennium, there were sev- eral pretty girls in bloom around the pool, one of them my daughter, painting their toenails a pale, nacreous blue, gossiping about gap years, and dreaming of their future in the new century. There is nothing like the sight of attractive young things in bikinis to concentrate the mature mind in an autumnal sort of way.
We tried, or at least some of us tried, to distract ourselves with violent exercise, despite the violent heat. One woman friend with a particularly dazzling figure arrived last week with three small boys and a whole suitcase full of what I suppose must be called pool toys — foam-rubber dumb-bells for underwater arm exercises and an assortment of strange floating objects in fashionable pastel shades for water-aero- bics. We went for three-hour walks in the Woods and up into the sierras, starting in the cool of the morning, or in the declining heat of the evening. We subjected our- selves to American workout videotapes and the harsh cries of Californian body bullies 'Tighten that tush! You can do it! I'm proud of you!' — and we did serious aero- bic swimming. We all felt better and better, but no amount of fitness fanaticism could disguise from us the fact that not only sum- mer, but time was wearing on.
Part of my sadness had to do with what I feel sure time will soon do to Andalucia. Cork has until now been a major industry, and the cork trees, with their distinctive stripped trunks, give the sierras a particular beauty. Now it seems it has been decided that fake cork is better than the real thing for stopping up wine bottles, so the industry is probably doomed. The same applies to the chestnut forests: chestnuts are said to be no longer cost-effective to harvest and process. So that industry may be doomed, too, and with them both, perhaps, the distinctive land- scape. Meanwhile, more and more imported eucalyptus trees are growing up, greedily drinking the scarce water with their deep roots, and changing the aspect of the sierras. It is not surprising that along the roads there are signs protesting 'No to Eucalyptus'.
S ome of us went to a very good bullfight in Aracena. All of us agreed that it's aston- ishing it is still allowed; it cannot be long before bullfighting is repressed, if only by EU 'harmonisation' — already it is illegal in Portugal, only a few miles away. And with it another major rural industry will disappear. The affectionate interest of foreigners like us is always the kiss of death, too. The Sierra de Aracena is a National Park, and perhaps the Spanish will take care to protect it, but I can't help feeling that this part of Spain is destined to become another Tuscany, and be `Your usual table, Sir?' visited by the Blairs. It is too good to be true for very much longer.
Perhaps it was a mistake, after this peaceful idyll, to return home in the middle of the Notting Hill Carnival, which takes place very close to our house. Our street is off the Ladbroke Grove, close to the Porto- bello Road, where some of the main action is. And it is staggeringly noisy. On Monday afternoon, before things really got going, I could actually feel the reverberations of the music in our floorboards, through my shoes, even though all the windows were closed.
My 12-year-old son wanted to go out and see what was happening, so we walked into the crowds. Close up, the music was so loud it actually hurt my ears; people always accuse me of priggery when I complain about this, but I think it's a different kind of priggery to pretend not to notice. Noth- ing much was happening, apart from the noise. It didn't seem to be very different from any other year — friendly, noisy, filthy and smelly. All along the Ladbroke Grove, people were so tightly packed together that it was difficult to move at all; it was only on the rooftops or in the smaller side-streets that there was room enough to dance, if that is the right word for the overt, if clumsy, simulation of sex that was going on all around us. I felt like a voyeur at a mass audition for a low-grade, low-budget, amateur hard-porn movie. However, the general mood was very relaxed and friend- ly. Here and there people were peacefully smoking dope, sending out delicious blue, remembered fumes, which reminded me very powerfully of youth and lost content.
Abandoning the carnival, I went home to put some clothes in the washing-machine in the basement. As I switched it on I heard a trickle of water in the wrong place, clearly a leaking pipe; obviously something had gone wrong, as something always does, in our absence. The noise seemed to be com- ing from near the basement door and, as I glanced through its glass panels into the area, I discovered to my amazement the true source of this long-drawn-out trickle. An extremely tall and extremely cool young dude with dreadlocks, grinning broadly at me, and only a couple of inches away from me on the other side of the door, was lengthily and deliberately peeing against it. I banged the glass in fury, but he only grinned more widely at me, and with a salu- tatory little shake of the offending member, he adjusted his dress, leapt up the area steps, and disappeared off into the gather- ing din. All the same, it's good to be home.
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