I went to a clinic at the hospital in Almería on Thursday for a check-up and got a thumb’s up (to coin a phrase) from the proctologist. So that’s good news – I hope my last girlfriend, who dumped me a while back, is reading this.
The next day, I thought I’d better have a long walk, so I wandered along the beach for a while, preferring as always to tread the bicycle lane – it’s easier on the feet, you never get hit by a jogger rushing up behind you and, generally speaking, it has better views. I’m careful of course, and keep to the left, pressing myself against the hedge when there’s an oncoming cyclist. This time, a tandem bicycle went past with a couple pounding away in cadence. Next thing will be a penny-farthing with a bloke wearing a bowler hat and shorts.
I wonder though if a conversation ever arises back at the nest – ‘Maud, I need a packet of smokes, would you mind helping me peddle down to the fag shop?’
Nothing looks sillier, and is probably dangerous too (no weight over the rear brakes), than a tandem with no back-rider weaving down the hill: ‘Oy mate, yer passenger’s fallen off!’ 
Thinking idly about this and then, remembering the looming All Souls' Day, I took myself to the cemetery to see my family and some friends.
Each year, more of my gang are to be found in the local necropolis, while less of them remain out of it (as it were).
There were a lot of cars in the parking lot, and an old girl was there, squatting on an upturned flowerpot and selling blooms to adorn the niches therein.
We have a particularly lovely camposanto, with the Departed stacked, as it were, three stories high (come to think of it, just slightly smaller than some of those holiday apartments on the beach, yet far more permanent).
The graveyard is beautifully conserved, with plenty of grassy spaces and now (adopting a custom I saw in a German Friedhof last year) brooms and dustpans are present here and there with the sign that reads (a trifle forlornly) – ‘Please put them back when you are finished with them’.
On the weekend, the camposanto was a riot of both flowers and candles.
I was cleaning the dust on the lápida of my wife, who left us twelve years ago, when I stopped to speak to a neighbour performing a similar task. I don’t think I had seen him in twenty years or more, so I made the observation that the nice thing about our beautiful cementerio is that all of us will end up here one day and it’s the only place I know which is truly integrated, foreigners and locals, side by side in harmony. As to whether blissful, I couldn’t really say.
My friend – who used to work in the bank in the next-door village – might have drifted to the right during the years we’ve been estranged. He now wears a wrist-bracelet of a party anxious to change the fortunes of the country in the forthcoming election. That particular party has a ‘Spaniards First’ motto and I could see a distant look in his eye as he imagined all of the foreigners being moved to the niches strategically built next to the toilets.
So, down to the café for a beer and a tapa. I did eleven thousand steps, says I triumphantly to the waiter, a convivial fellow called Pablo. He looked at his watch – one of those intelligent ones which does everything except draw you a bath. I’ve done eleven thousand as well since I started work here this morning, he tells me, and I haven’t even been out of the door.
Well, I’m a lot older, I said weakly, and asked him for a second beer.