Election day looms

So the UK General Election is set for 6^th May. Judging by the hyped-up newscasters on Sky we’ll all feel politically burned out within a few days. No one can last a month of this stuff. It’s not like the good old days when the parties were separated by policies and values that made for a good scrap on the telly: the only arguments I heard today were that David Cameron had a privileged background (shock horror); Gordon Brown has ‘gravitas’ (although he can lose that if he visits the gym more often); and the Other One can sometimes argue passionately about Stuff. But no one knows quite what Stuff that would be. Looks like we in the UK, and those of us soon to be returning to it, are in for a month of luke warm debate about which party leader has the best haircut, the prettiest wife and the good sense to be born of a father who hadn’t been too much of a financial success.

At least I won’t need to pay too much attention to it all. I already know where my vote is going, which means I can focus on my novel for the rest of the month. Well, that and getting the back garden ready for barbecues on the off-chance that we get one or two days without torrential rain this ‘summer’. Today was a hot one in volcano-land, so I made sure I wore my jeans and jacket to keep the sun off me. Things started off with me driving with my Brazilian missus in a German car to eat an American breakfast in an Irish restaurant in a Spanish marina development a hundred miles from Western Sahara. After that things settled down a little, and I studied some more Mayan glyphs and continued to avoid the overly-enthusiastic sunshine.

In the evening I found an English language bookshop and browsed around its limited offerings. Most of its stock was second-hand, brought to this island by tourists who would read their Mills and Boon romantic novels and then trade them in for something else in this shop. The best thing about this place was that it stocked two second hand Summersdale books: Downhill all the Way by Edward Enfield, and Mañana Mañana by Peter Kerr. It was nice to see a book that I had been involved with so far from home (I worked on the cover design for the latter title). Keen to spread the word about our excellent travel books I bought the Peter Kerr memoir in order to leave it behind at the villa for the next tenants to enjoy. I hope that one day copies of The Sphinx Scrolls will find their way to remote parts of the world like this…