Easter Sunday and volcano wine

Easter Sunday in a remote Spanish outpost is just the same as in Britain, only without the obligatory chocolate eggs and without the DIY projects that get abandoned when it’s time to go back to work. The climate doesn’t suit chocolate, so I can understand the thinking behind that. But I saw plenty of evidence today of abandoned DIY projects. Or maybe that’s just the way they want their villages to look.

One location that is anything but a bodge job is Cesar Manrique’s gaff. He was a local architect, artist and visionary who designed the handful of tourist attractions on the island of Lanzarote (not including the volcanoes themselves), and who created for himself a magical home carved out of a section of a volcanic larva field. This house was reminiscent of an early James Bond bad guy’s lair. His designs work organically with the rock, which is ironic because very little organic life actually exists in that larva field. The view from one window is not dissimilar to a lifeless lunar landscape.

Locating Manrique’s house required the use of local road signs. On this small island it is clearly assumed that everyone knows their way around, thus avoiding the need for logical and comprehensive signage. Every car journey here to date has involved numerous extensive detours, sometimes all the way round an entire volcano or two, before finding somewhere to turn around and try a different route. It’s all part of the fun of visiting places like this. The roads are smooth and there is plenty of public art in the middle of the roundabouts. But providing road signs for tourists is considered superfluous. At least I can enjoy a kinetic rotating statue whilst circumnavigating a ring road for the tenth time.

Lunch today involved a bottle of the local rosé wine, made from vines grown in volcanic ash on the slopes of the fire mountains. It was good stuff. So good, in fact, that I passed out in the afternoon and didn’t get much novel editing done. I managed to finish the section where Matt is at the British Embassy in Paris, which now includes the added details and factual accuracy gained from Google Street View yesterday. After a couple of pages I went down to listen to a Scottish one man band singing by the poolside. And after a couple of his songs I went back inside again.

Extending the search for inspiration

I printed out my novel when I finished writing last night. It’s quite a major investment in paper given the word count, so it’s not something I do very often. In fact, it’s the first print-out I’ve done for years, and it’s great to see it on paper again as well as being reassuring to know that there’s a hard copy backup of the edits I’ve made during the past month. Luckily I have a laser printer that can do double-sided prints, so that helps keep the pile of paper manageable.

Years ago I used to print out what I’d written every day, no matter where I was. Whilst on a trip to India in 2000 I took a suitcase containing an inkjet printer in its original packaging, a laptop, charger, some floppy disks (remember them?) and very little else. When you’re writing several thousand words a day you get rather possessive over your creation. I was so paranoid that the laptop and floppies I was using would get damaged by the humidity, airport scanners, theft or the general abuse they experience when travelling that I printed two copies of everything I wrote, put one copy in my baggage and posted the other copy back to my home address via airmail. That all seems a bit quaint now that we have the option of ‘cloud storage’, whatever that is.

So, having printed out the entire novel I put it in my laptop bag along with my laptop, charger and some research books. Then I weighed the bulging bag on my postal scales, was relieved to see that it weighed less than ten kilos, and went to bed.

Skip ahead to today, which has been weird in a good way. It all started off normally, half and hour or so on the treadmill with unimpressive results. Catching up with e-mails, raw vegetable juice for breakfast (yum, yum). Did the washing-up, stuck some bags in the car, and drove to Bournemouth with ‘Er Indoors, hopped on a Boeing 737-800 with curiously bent wing tips, and landed four hours later on a volcanic island off the African coast.

It’s now almost midnight, I’m writing this blog in a slightly drunken haze (the obliging barman didn’t feel the need to use measures when serving spirits) sitting on the balcony of a Lanzarote villa with a panoramic sea view. If inspiration doesn’t flow here, it won’t flow anywhere. But to be honest, I didn’t come here for inspiration. I’m enjoying the rewrites and I wasn’t stuck anyway. Britain is suffering from blizzards this week, and I’ll be suffering from beaches, sunshine and sangria while I rewrite the next chapters. How awful.