A week in Dartmouth, Devon
It was the summer of 2000. A friend of mine — the one born in Bilbao who once said I had beautiful legs, and whom I had met at university just minutes after the kind metalhead1 — was serving breakfast in the courtyard of a café in Dartmouth.
At the time, I was suffering from extreme anxiety, which among other things, had caused hair loss: I have much more hair now than I did when I was twenty.
The historic Concorde accident had just occurred. The voice of my flight’s pilot, a Commander Martínez or something like that, sounded decidedly drunk to me. He actually, drunk or not, would give us a most exciting flight despite the calm weather.
I was young, atheist and Nietzschean and had a zest for life. I had won literary prizes and entered university for free thanks to my first-class honours. I was sure of my glorious destiny — either, at least, of ‘the meaning of the earth’. So the notion of dying in a plane crash didn’t seem as appropriate, rational and appealing to me as it would years later and it made my anxiety even worse.
We landed safely at Gatwick Airport. There I discovered that the directions my friend had given me were for getting to Dartmouth from Heathrow. I felt so distraught that I had to have the station master repeat the directions five times — track 4B: I’ll never forget it — until I finally understood. A very kind gentleman helped me work out a new route and gave me his card so I could call him if I got hopelessly lost.
With the journey sorted at last, aboard a vintage train that would take me directly to Dartmouth, I fell asleep for a while, exhausted, while gazing out the window at the green landscapes and wooden stations.
When I woke up, I found myself in the middle of the sea and felt like I was again on the verge of a heart attack. It really was nothing but water, water all around, but I looked down at my feet and saw that the floor of the train was still there, and there was also a window between me and the sea. I calmed down.
Among my friend’s circle of friends in Dartmouth, I was introduced to a pretty girl whom I decided was French. While I kissed her on each cheek, as we do in Spain when introducing or being introduced to a girl, she reacted in terror, so now I conclude she was not French, since the French equivalent is three (!) kisses. But at that moment I still thought she was French. I never approached her again nor did we ever exchange a word.
There was also a girl from the Canary Islands — not by my decision, this time — who spoke English exactly as it is written, yet British people understood her, or pretended to, without any problem. Conversely, I strove to pronounce properly but they struggled to understand me. Another member of the group, the hospitable Harry, whose mother was a Spanish language teacher, consoled me by explaining that I was pronouncing far too carefully. Who knows. I’ll always have that moment when I jumped into a conversation, opening with:
‘As far as I'm concerned, …’
and a guy nodded and praised me:
‘Oh, “as far as I’m concerned”, very good English!’
and I felt that suddenly everything had come in handy, even though I didn’t say much else that night.
The pubs closed earlier than in Spain. Madison Avenue’s ‘Don’t Call Me Baby’ played everywhere, with the instrumental from ‘Ma quale idea’, which I had considered a huge hit but no one else around there knew.
I got sunburned on a trip to a beach despite the fact that the infernal Iberian sun wasn’t there. The place was like the radio scene in Moonrise Kingdom, only with beer, more people, no girlfriend, no kisses. The Canary Islander said my face looked like I’d just seen a ghost, I don’t remember whether or not I told her about my anxiety.
At the end of my stay, I bought an old edition of Brave New World in what seemed to me at the time to be a church, albeit the facts only indicate that they sold books there and rented out sleeping accommodations.
The return to Madrid went according to plan. It began with me making a beeline to the taxicab’s driver’s seat, on the other side. The driver was a kind of female Benny Hill. I think Benny Hill’s theme tune was even playing, just as the horses appear in Young Frankenstein whenever someone says ‘Frau Blücher’. She laughed and asked me if I was thinking of getting behind the wheel.