Running wild

I’m doing 170 kilometres an hour along the motorway from Barcelona to Pamplona. I pass a sign telling me I am now entering Navarre, and passing from Aragon to the Basque country. It’s a blue sign, about 20 foot square and riddled with holes. Where I live many of our road signs are peppered with shot, done for a laugh. But these are made by some sort of high-calibre rifle. The motorway is like a racetrack, black, cambered, empty, a continuous line of bougainvillaea bushes down the central reservation. I’m driving a Merc worth 20 grand. My own car back home is worth, for insurance purposes, 150 quid. I’m squirting the Merc around the insides of the bends in quiet and comfort. The outside temperature, it says on the dashboard, is 38 degrees. With the air conditioning on full I’m a pleasantly cool 16 degrees. On either side is a wide plain, parched white, and on the low hills in the distance hundreds of windmills, blades stationary.