On inauspicious starts
Have started three months of vagrancy moving between continents, hotels and bars. The first leg, my journey to Granada in southern Spain was a long, nightmarish testing ground of endurance and self-flagellation. I missed my flight to Seville due to a number of reasons, which I immediately afterwards categorised as completely manageable except apparently for my own deeply ingrained idiocy.

A saving grace was that because I chose a proper airline, the 'I've missed my flight' lady was actually very helpful, trying to get me anywhere in the south of Spain that she could. Was Alicante any good? Or Gibralter? Or how about Northern Algeria then an 18 hour ferry?

In the end I got a later flight to Malaga which left me just enough time to get really stuck into myself about how hopeless I am. I´m unsure how many flights one is allowed to miss before one is expected to know better, but I suspect that my current tally of three missed flights in the last two years falls significantly short of world´s best practice. Sure, only one of those flights (today´s) was entirely due to my own negligance, but halfway through the second pint and the third cigarette, that was hardly the point! The point at the time, as far as I can recall, was that I was a stupid bloody idiot who shouldn´t be left alone to do anything by himself ever! Ever!

But that was in London. Now I´m in a foreign country with beautiful weather and beautiful people who have rather strange haircuts. And even better, I get to play around with my very rudimentary yet ceaselessly enthusiastic phrasebook Spanish. I love ordering a beer and a coke in stuttering ungrammatical Spanish, then seeing that certain look of incomprehension and confusion when the bartender realises that I am in fact speaking their language, and they are therefore expected to understand me. It only gets better when I resolutely do not understand their follow-up questions, and am reduced to looking friendly yet simple. You know, it really does work.