We’d planned it carefully, booked the flights, the airport carpark, the Covid tests and accommodation. Four nights in Portugal, staying with friends, Mariam and Martino and their children, whose names also begin with an M, in Cascais, a stone’s throw from the sea. We planned our day trip to Sintra, some wanderings in the neighbourhood, the morning stroll and coffee and pastel de nata in a pavement café. The evening glass of wine beside the bay. We arranged to take our hosts for dinner on the Saturday and they booked a babysitter. Sorted.
But then, just a week before departure, we were invited to the funeral of a very important person who had changed the course of our lives dramatically when Ian met him on a plane from Aberdeen to Luton in late 2003. Henri offered Ian a job in The Hague and this altered everything. There was no question. We’d go. And so we booked new flights, rearranged the Covid tests, booked an airport hotel and I decided to stay on a few days longer than Ian. With no flight refunds (of course, this was Ryanair) and flight changes costing more than new flights, we’d now booked a total of seven flights. No matter. It would be worth it. Like any good article our middle would follow the rule of three – food, friends and sunshine abroad.
Within a few hours of landing and after a high tea of Pakistani samosas and Portuguese cakes we were walking along the promenade from Estoril to Cascais with Mariam. The sea was calm, the sky, though dove grey was filled with promise and at last it felt as if everything was going to plan. Indeed, the next day saw us brunch on Mariam’s terrace from blue china and yellow napkins. – the colours that mirror the cover of her book, This Messy Mobile Life, and most of her Instagram photos. The sun blazed as we gazed down beyond the fringe of nail red bougainvillea to a garden of orange, lemon and fig trees.
The weekend unfolded beautifully. The days were shirtsleeve hot, the beaches full of bright young things with Instaplumped lips pouting at their cameraphones and brave cold water swimmers diving into shallow waves.
Sam was in Portugal for work and would join us for dinner. Unexpectedly, he discovered a school friend, Maya, lived in Cascais so she came too.
We visited Sintra and though visited the National Palace, its walls decorated with the blue and green patterned tiles so typical of the country. I see a wide chair in ‘Mariam’s’ colours and take a photograph.
It was perfect. It was everything we’d hoped for and more. Ian found his inner child and played football with the M1and M2. I found my inner grandmother and played bricks with 18-month-old M3.
After Ian left for home and Martino headed to Nigeria on business, I could become the kind of writer who enjoys coffees by the beach, watches people go by, lounges on the terrace to edit manuscripts, sipping orange juice from those very trees (I made that up, but I could have done it, honest) inventing new metaphors, mindful that my writing sap was rising as my muse was prodded awake by the experiences of being in a new place in the sunshine.
Two more days of this. Two more days of bliss.
But then it all went awry.
When Mariam’s nine-year-old returned to school on the Monday it became clear that her classmates were falling ill with Covid like dominoes. It was only a matter of time before it was her, then me and I’d be unable to get back to the UK as planned. So, while Mariam isolated herself from me with her children I went walking the streets in search of some over-the-counter lateral flow tests to be sure I was still clear of the virus. I was, so I booked yet another, the eighth, flight. I stayed in my bedroom with a mug of tea until morning, when, I did yet another test – negative again – and caught a taxi to the airport.
Our drive took us along the beach of Estoril. The surf was up and galloping to shore like white stallions with flowing seaspray manes. Swarms of surfers swam for their lives out to sea like a shoal of white-bellied beetles before hurtling home. Meanwhile, I put my sunglasses into my carry-on and dawdled towards the disappointment of the barren non-schengen departure lounge, an overpriced flat white at a sticky table, and home.
Life as story
And as I sat at that table the light dawned. Our trip was the perfect metaphor for writing a story, or article, blog, memoir or novel. We make a plan. We work out our beginning, middle and end. In the writing, the unfolding, however, things may not go to plan. New ideas and discoveries can barge in as if from nowhere forcing us to go back and alter our beginning so it can integrate into a new whole. The middle may go better than we hoped but then we find ourselves obliged to rework the ending once, twice, maybe more. It is so often like this.
Of course we must plan what we are going to write in advance. It is important that we know our starting and ending points as well as the middle, but a piece of writing, like life, is organic. It can change along the way. Characters may surprise us. Interviewees may say something so earth-shatteringly brilliant that we know we need to adjust the rest of the piece to fit. We chance upon an article in a newspaper or hear a podcast that shifts our thinking and we know instinctively that this new information warrants a place too. We find parallels where we had not expected them and remove items that do not belong. We hone and adjust as we edit, polish and prune until it’s good enough. It’s done.
As I sit on my final flight of this trip I know our long weekend in Portugal is over too. From the vantage point of the window of this Boeing 737 I notice the plane’s livery is in Mariam’s favourite mustard yellow and the view below her beloved aqua blue. I look down and back at the days that past and know that despite the unexpected changes the whole has been perfect. Just perfect.
PS
In real life I do not recommend you do as I do – in a piece I’d plan to publish I would never give all my characters names that begin with the same letter.
IMAGES – Mariam’s sofa, the Ryanair colours, the table on the terrace, the beach. The family
