Home from holiday

Home from holiday - we caught the plane late Friday night and I got home today. It's been minus degrees here all week apparently. The cottage was like an ice box, so I lit a huge fire; collected dogs, bathed walked and fed them; then went back to Himself’s central heating picking up a curry for dinner en route. I've just unpacked my bag - enough sensibility for tonight. Tomorrow I'll deal with laundry and mail and other matters of responsibility.

It's been a strange week. We knew Tenerife would be a little different - pure package holiday - but it wasn't quite as ghastly as anticipated. Not quite relentlessly kiss-me-quick hats and English breakfasts after all, although there was a fair degree of that, lots of tattoos in evidence at the pool, and supertanned bulky women oozing out of spangled tops and plunging 18 in straws through cherries and sparklers and paper umbrellas into vibrantly coloured cocktails in tall flared glasses. But after three days we discovered we weren't where we thought we were, which was a little disorientating.

We walked to Las Americas one evening - along an esplanade. International restaurants gave way to Irish bars, and English bars and casinos and night clubs the deeper into Los Americas we went: all very tawdry and depressing. We turned back, got lost, and found a wonderful little restaurant which served excellent fish, tucked away behind a hospital - so good we went back another night for paella, despite the tuneless crooner who comprised the evening's live entertainment, and the (largely English) clientele waving their hands in the air as they sang along to Tom Jones.

The food was wonderful. One night we found an Italian restaurant, ate pasta, drank wine from enormous balloon glasses, and were treated to pudding on the house. Another night I had swordfish while Himself ate veal. We stumbled across a proper Canarian restaurant in the north, where you chose your own fish from an aquarium. I think I had snapper but since the waiter spoke no English and my Spanish doesn't include enough words for fruit from the sea, it could have been anything except the pike, which I recognised and banned from my plate. Himself had a sea food stew, which included mussels and prawns and squid and octopus as expected, but also limpets or barnacles.

The weather wasn't great - overcast for at least half each day and on a couple of occasions the sun didn't break through at all: warm enough to stroll around in T-shirts and shorts, and to eat outside at night, but not hot enough to encourage reading by the pool and turning brown. We hired a car and drove north, hoping to reach La Laguna, where, unusually, the houses are significantly more than twenty years old and built from stone not concrete. We got very lost and spent almost 2 hours driving through manic traffic in the capital - made all the more hair-raising as I had to drive on the 'wrong' side of the road, didn't understand any of the road markings, kept forgetting the rear-view mirror would be on my right and that I was supposed to drive anti-clockwise round roundabouts. Another day we drove west towards blue sky, stopped where the sun was strong enough to cast sharp shadows, and stripped off to read, eat ice cream and watch dolphins from a bench above a tiny black-sand beach, before travelling further round the coast to Los Gigantos, where we were awed by the second highest sea cliffs in the world, and ignored invitations to enter twee coffee houses for scones, jam and 'real English tea'.

The water is bad; soft drinks are exorbitant; wine is cheap; spirits are very cheap and measured by the glass. We drank rather a lot of alcohol in consequence. We overindulged to such an extent last Sunday that neither of us can remember anything at all about the evening.

Someone stole Himself’s battered but beloved boat shoes.

We found what we thought was a Turkish coffee shop on the sea front: startlingly empty. The coffee was served from a thermos, and cakes appeared to be served with boiled egg. It was a Swedish tourist office and evangelical church, and the cakes weren't cakes but some kind of oval unleavened bread encasing what appeared to be wallpaper paste.

Despite the place being stiff with Brits we were taken for Swedish, French, German and Dutch - and I was taken for someone's mother. We met a Norwegian couple in a bar who asked Himself three times what he did and asked me several times more about our children. We met a Dutch couple at the complex who loved the place so much they'd spent 5 weeks there every year since 1996. We met a couple of young Glaswegian boys when we all waiting in the bar while the flats were readied - their heads were shaven, their tattoos were dark against white skin. We met them again when they leapt over the wall between our patio and the pool, mistaking our flat for theirs; and again on the last morning when we were waiting in the sun for the coach to the airport: Himself and I read, they suffered hangovers. They were as pale as when they arrived, having partied late each night and woken only in time to hit the night scene. We ended up sitting behind them on the coach, so heard their astonishment on seeing the place in daylight for the first time.

We were advised by a local to go down to the sea front to watch the police impound illegally parked cars. So we did just that, and had trouble tearing ourselves away - scores of hired cars were lifted or dragged onto trailers, or towed away, by about a dozen policemen who were utterly oblivious to screaming handbrakes and the smell of burning rubber.

We sat in a restaurant with live music and saw a group of seniors walking tipsily home, who, on hearing the music, took their partners and waltzed beautifully along the pavement, then out into two lanes of traffic, which stopped for them.

I read AS Byatt's A Whistling Woman, which was, I think, a failed attempt to replicate the wonder of Possession; a detective story by James Lee Burke which moved so fast through such a complicated plot that I was left completely unable to tell not only who did it, but what he'd done; and Hosseini's Kite Runner, which I couldn't put down; the end made me cry; and I now want to visit Afghanistan. We both read Stuart McSomeone's excellent detective story Cold Granite, set in Aberdeen - the plot wanders all over the place and it suffers the first-novel disease of dotting all plot I's and crossing all plot T's but the characters are superbly drawn.

It was a full week in an odd way; not busy but peculiarly rich.