Lost in the country

Something to Declare

I THOUGHT A HOLIDAY IN A SECLUDED cottage in Spain was just the tonic for my busy technology-fuelled modern life. How wrong I was. Eight hours of flying, driving, sweating, rowing and crying it took us to get here to this glorious isolation. Our little farmhouse is perched up high in a Spanish hillside wilderness. There are no roads, just the dirt track that led us here. There are no noises other than the strange squawking of unidentifiable wildlife lurking in the bushes. And there are no people other than the bloodthirsty inbred yokels who reside in my increasingly paranoid imagination.

What the hell am I here for? They haven’t got satellite TV, there’s no mobile reception and I just found a dead vole in the cupboard under the sink. I think it had been drinking the bleach. At least that’s what I’m hoping. A psychotic bumpkin may well have left it there as some sort of grizzly warning. A warning that says: “Stop tearing the soul out of our secluded hamlet English scum or you’ll go the same way as the rodent.” Is a vole a rodent? Who knows? That’s the sort of thing I’d usually be able to Google in seconds. But here? Forget it. I’m completely out on the edge, staring into the abyss of lonely, petrified, Wi-Fi-less silence. And we paid for this.

My wife said a bit of seclusion would be good for us. “She’s right!” I thought. “Quiet contemplation is just what I need.” Then I actually got up here and immediately thought: “Oh yeah, now I remember, I hate seclusion. It’s my idea of hell. This feels like being in prison! Why didn’t I think all this through before forking out two grand?”

Quiet contemplation twists and contorts my mind. By day, I lie by the pool pretending to read The God Delusion, while secretly fretting about getting bitten by a snake and having to wait two hours for the rubbishy foreign hospital to send the medi-copter. By night, I pretend to be asleep while my mind is terrorised by visions of Big Pablo and the boys from the village making their way up the dirt track in their tractor, carrying rusty farm implements, a burning Union Jack and a barrel filled with dead voles and bleach.

I grew up by the A4 in Hammersmith. I only really feel safe and secure when I can hear the angry rumbling of freight vehicles and superbikes rushing by my bedroom window. Next year, I’m holidaying in Birmingham.