A warm Sahara wind was blowing and by late afternoon the western sky where it met the sea was the colour of golden sand. Surfers bobbed like seals on the milky ocean, waiting for a wave. It stretched like a sheet of silk all the way to the golden horizon.
Lying by the hotel pool facing the seafront, I was watching the surfers, the fishing boats, the palm trees waving on the promenade, and something else.
‘John, I just need to be honest with you,’ said a glamorous, buxom, pink-lipsticked blonde lady in her sixties wearing a leopard-print sarong, sitting on a sunbed sideways facing the back of a slim, frightened-looking man, also in his sixties.
She spoke in a soft Scottish accent, coquettishly stirring a cocktail in a poolside cardboard cup.
This is what I came to Tenerife for, I thought. Why waste money going to the Maldives when I can fly three-and-a-half hours from the south of Ireland to somewhere I can wear a yellow wristband and watch the soap operas of our times?
‘John, are you listening to me? If we can’t talk, we can’t have true intimacy…’
John looked like he wanted to kill himself. He stared at his feet, sitting sideways on the lounger with his back to her.
‘If you hadn’t seen that text on my phone last night…,’ she said and didn’t finish. There was nowhere for that sentence to go.
Two silver surfers in their prime having a romantic winter break… only she had someone else on the go and he hadn’t signed up for that.
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