How you know you’re having a good summer

- breakfast is late and leisurely, and rather than actually ending, it just peters out into a vague stirring to activities which mostly don’t require you to relinquish your still unfinished coffee; check your mails, from the one place on the verandah you can get reception; carry the used crockery back inside by dribs and drabs; tidy up last night’s spent matches and mosquito coil stubs; top up your phone credit; read.

- the news all seems to be happening a long, long way away.

- you haven’t had access to a PS3 for more than a month; you don’t care.

- your socks are all still packed neatly away in the suitcase you brought them in, surplus to requirements since you arrived.

- your favourite T-shirts are growing bleached and frayed with prolonged exposure to seawater, suncream, chlorine, sweat; you find you like them better that way, and like yourself better when you wear them.

- your hair’s a mess – long and unruly and stacked stiff with salt, suncream, chlorine, sweat; you don’t care.  Most mornings, you grin at yourself in the mirror like sharing a secret.

- your nearest supermarket car park features views out across heat-hazed open ground and ragged giant palms to the sea.

- you’ll cheerfully drive the seven kilometres of winding mountain road to the village on an empty stomach and sleep-clogged eyes to get fresh bread and coffee for breakfast.

- you buy and barbecue meat at the slightest excuse, using wood and pine cones you foraged for yourself just hours earlier; in certain places, at certain moments, as you forage, the breeze carries hints of rosemary and wild thyme.

- you haven’t eaten inside for a month now; the idea of doing so starts to seem odd.

- despite all this food, you seem to be losing weight.  Or maybe it’s just the tan.

- your three year old son mistakes Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart for the theme tune to Postman Pat – Special Delivery, and insists you play it over and over again in the car.  You comply, and after a while you start to realise that despite Ian Curtis’s mournful voice and lyrics, Love Will Tear Us Apart is actually quite a catchy, upbeat little number….

- at night the stars glimmer so brightly and the cicadas’ rhythmic chirring sounds so loud that that they seem to blend, to become two sensory aspects of the same huge single phenomenon

- you shower outside with a garden hose whose coils have been heated so long in the sun that the water comes out too hot to use for the first thirty seconds.

- you’re careful to avoid actual serious sunburn or heatstroke (obsessive care of your infant son has spilled over into looking after yourself better too), but you find flirting with borderline overdoses of sun carries the same faintly masochistic pleasures as the hangovers and Sunday mornings after of your misspent youth.

- you get your hair cut locally and they fuck it up; you don’t care.

- you rip out the inner wall on a front tyre when it slips over the edge of a ragged poured concrete track and catches (on reflection, you maybe took that corner a little too hard, maybe had the Joy Division cranked up a little too loud); no matter.  Changing the tyre in 30 degrees of heat feels like Boy’s Own fun.

- you’ve quite forgotten you’ll ever have to go home.