A Spanish friend from our previous visit here came round the other afternoon with her two children. We gave them something to drink and M prepared a small dish with some almonds and dried figs for them to eat. The younger of the two was about Orlando’s age and very calm. He played on the rooftop with a couple of nylon hoops that had come as stiffeners with a shower hat and a stick, bowling the hoops around with quiet concentration. The older, aged seven, started out very studiously, arranging and rearranging some geometric puzzles M had made.
Intermittently, they reached out and ate a fig or almond. At some point, I noticed one of the marzipan logs we had brought back from England. Thinking they might enjoy a bite of something different, I sliced off a few morsels and put them in the bowl with the fruit and nuts. The younger boy tried one but spat it out; the older got stuck in and soon polished them off.
By then, he had found M’s skipping rope and was trying it out on the roof terrace. We all demonstrated our prowess and he got fairly excited trying to do five skips in a row. Then he started going slightly wild, attaching one end of the rope to the washing line and swinging it about violently, cackling as he did so, while leaping manically, before falling over backwards. The more often he fell, the more excited he got. His mother tried to restrain him, but he shrugged her off. He began leaping about like some sort of dervish, banging into the walls.
At one point, he launched himself into the air, and almost sailed over the modest parapet that kept people from toppling off the roof terrace onto the ground below. This seemed to ignite his passions even more. I started getting worried; I might end the day trying to explain his death to the authorities. Encircling him in my arms and herding him indoors was like trying to contain a torrent. He easily slipped my grasp and started prising water and gas pipes off the wall. Leaping away as I approached, he ran to the parapet and hopped along it. I grabbed him and bundled him inside.
Eventually, they left, and we considered what could have turned him from a reasonable being of some studiousness into a raving lunatic in a matter of minutes. Smoothing out the wrapping from the marzipan log, all was revealed. It contained a trivial percentage of almonds, an abundance of sugar and sundry other highly enervating additives.
Be warned!

We set off in search of these fabled pools knowing no more than that they were on the outskirts of Granada. When we got to Santa Fe, we started asking passers by for directions to the ‘agua caliente’. Somewhere in the ‘campo’, we were told. After an hour or so of driving up and down the same old roads, I suddenly caught sight of a sign marked ‘banos’. I swerved off the road, and pulled up alongside a Rasta haired girl with an enormous earring who was lugging a backpack. It turned out she was heading for the same place as us, so we offered her a lift. She was strangely silent as to the exact direction we should take when we came to the first fork in the road; she didn’t seem to understand our broken Spanish. We took a guess and turned right down a dirt track. Everything was indescribably muddy, as it had been raining for two days non-stop. We pulled up at a barricaded house, and while Michelle got out to ask for directions, I swivelled around to inquire whether the girl spoke English. No, she didn’t. French, perhaps? Indeed, she did. In fact, it turned out she was French. She told us some garbled story about living in Barcelona, coming down to Granada with friends, who had since legged it to Morocco, and having driven to the ‘banos’ at night – hence, her uncertainty about the route.

As we droved down ever more ridiculously muddy tracks, slipping and swerving wildly, I began to understand why car hire companies exclude damage to the vehicles underside from their insurance. When, finally, we had no choice but to stop, our tyres wore a two inch crust of clay that denied them any semblance of grip. Michelle and the girl got out to see if they could see anything over the brow of a nearby hill. They were looking for ‘vans’. The girl had said the pools were delightful but ‘un peu hippie’. I got out to have a short stroll around. I took a dozen paces, only to find my flips flops had become encased in a shroud of glutinous clay that got heavier and heavier until finally the thongs snapped off! Squelching back to the car barefoot, I began to despair. Would I ever be able to turn the car around? Lost in this godforsaken place, even the allure of steaming hot pools of fresh spring water faded.

The girl finally got through to her friends on her mobile, but they only had time to explain the bare outline of the route we needed to take before their batteries died. We headed back to Santa Fe, me gunning the engine over the boggy bits and wondering how soon, and where, we could ditch our passenger. Very soon, we became hopelessly lost again, but by a stroke of fortune, we spied two Italian vans in a layby. They turned out to be current residents of the ‘banos’, and after some negotiation, we followed them there.

I’ve seen many a van in my time, and many a collection of vans with their unwashed occupants, their mangy dogs and their general air of menace behind the jovial exterior. This place was not untypical. Generally, out in the world, I feel somewhat ’underdressed’, but driving into this mud splattered valley, festooned with scores of travellers and their vehicles from every European nation, in our squeaky hire car, freshly shaven and wearing pristine trousers, I didn’t. The girl jumped out, to join her friends, explaining that the ‘pool’ – I was only momentarily disheartened by her use of the singular – was over a nearby hill, leaving us trying to decide where to park our car. I was having unpleasant flashbacks to some film I had seen or book I had read where a car is left in a dodgy area for about five minutes which is more than enough time for it to be stripped to a bare chassis by the time the owner returns.

The muddy ascent to the hill was made less agreeable, especially in bare feet, by the sheer quantity of dog shit everywhere, which was of much the same colour and texture as the earth. At least, I assume it was from dogs. Add to that a plethora of broken bottles, disgarded garbage and sullen looks, and the suspicion I was beginning to harbour that the fabled series of rock pools, with steaming water flowing from a delightful moss encrusted source, into a succession of large basins for lounging in, might not materialise, hardened by the moment.

We struggled to the top of the hill, and slid down the other side. The rising stream from an undeniable ‘pool’ of water was momentarily exhilarating, but the extreme depth and stickiness of the mud, the fact that a hippie tent enclosure more or less surrounded us, and the realisation that this pool was a man made, rather small, distinctly murky hole in the ground, fed by water spouting out of a rusty standpipe, brought us up short.

Gamely, I strode to the edge, trousering my wristwatch in preparation for stripping naked and sliding into what from the smell was unadulterated sulphur water from the depths of the earth; but looking around me, I lost my nerve. A thuggish type was leering at me from behind a nearby tarpaulin, I had just avoided stepping on a splintered bottle neck, and even now, I thought, our hire car could be being shredded. I momentarily bathed my muddy feet in the scorching water, before returning to the mire.

We hurried back by a less muddy path, passing a large number of French vans. Our friend was there and waved to us. ‘Un peu hippie’? Yikes!

It was only once we were well on our way that we realised this couldn’t possibly have been the place we were looking for. No regular Spaniard could have known about, still less recommended, somewhere so deeply ‘alternativo’. So, we’ll go back and take another look, during dryer weather.

Today, I cycled into Chichester to buy one of these at PC World:

I parked my bike near Staples and popped in to see if they had the same sleekly defined Jetbook ereader. They didn’t; but they did have this Archos model, for much the same price:

I played around with it for a while, trying to entice it to read the SD card I’d brought for the occasion; but my heart wasn’t in it. This tacky bit of kit was made of the sort of plastic Airfix models specialise in, and the so called ‘touch’ screen needed jabbing repeatedly to register my presence.

Finding the Jetbook in PC World, my heart sank as I encountered more of the same black plastic; but I was initially quite taken with the quality of the LCD text display. However, I struggled with the controls, and, again, my SD card failed to register. While I was grappling with various buttons, a gentlemen at my side tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I knew how to switch on the device he was testing. I glanced in his direction and saw one of these:

I reached across and touched and stroked this glistening piece of hardware. Just to show off, I revealed the ‘bookstore’, replete with hundreds of volumes, and opened one. I flipped the pages this way and that. Both of us became utterly transfixed by the staggeringly beautiful way the leaves of this virtual book curled, and then lay flat. The readability was absolute. Compared to the action and look of the frankly hideous artefact I found it hard to believe moments earlier I had been contemplating parting with money for, this was high art. As for the dedicated ebook readers with their ‘e-ink’, which were scattered around the same aisle, it was beyond comprehension to me how anyone was able to tolerate the black page ‘intermission’ experience every half minute while still maintaining their sanity.

At that moment, a PC World minion appeared at my side and asked if I needed assistence. I laughed mirthlessly. I said the best bit of assistence he could provide would be to display the piece of tack I had intended to buy as far as possible from the svelte object the gentleman next to me was hovering over with disgusting eagerness. How any commercial outlet of repute could place such disparate objects in such close proximity beat me. He nodded agreably. When I asked him to show me a page turn on the Jetbook, he laughed nervously as the LCD screen juddered into life. I then reached over and showed him one on the iPad. Did he seriously expect anyone to actually buy the sort of cracker infill represented by the ‘Jetbook’ when faced with this sort of competition?

Cackling manically, I turned to leave. The gentlemen at my side grasped my arm, excitedly.

“I must have one of these”, he said, “even if it means getting divorced.”

“Indeed”, I quipped. “You speak sooth.”