[ 11:21 Thursday 24 March – Villa Catalaneta, Pollença ]

As I sit here on the terrace bathed in birdsong, two thousand kilometres away Russian tanks are pounding Ukraine’s Black Sea ports into rubble. Life goes on but the shadow of war lurks always in the background. It is hard not to wonder what pandora’s box has been opened, and what will emerge from it in the months and years ahead.

Yesterday marked five years since Alejandro and I met, following a talk on fine-art curation in the digital sphere organised by Elaine. It still feels like yesterday that I spotted this handsome fellow grinning and gesticulating across the room. How can it be five years? The probability of meeting someone who shares my most obscure musical tastes, whose social values run close to mine and who enjoys so many of the same pursuits as me, must be infinitesimally small. How far we’ve come together in these years, how much richer my life is and how much I’ve learned from him.

This morning it rained. Now as the clouds lift, water drips from trees and bushes around the garden, creating an irregular counterpoint to the birds’ polyphony. Alejandro and I chose this house to spend six months over the winter. It’s located in the plain that spreads from the town of Pollença, in the foothills of the Tramuntana mountains, to the sheltered arc of the Bay of Pollença. It’s a spacious house with a big garden and a row of eleven tall palm trees, signalling its location across the landscape.

We arrived here at the start of November during a cataclysmic thunderstorm, which set the tone for our first two months here. A freakish chain of storm systems passed through the western Mediterranean, bringing two months of almost unbroken gales and torrential rain.

Fields and roads were flooded. Sporadic electricity outages became familiar occurrences. Gusts were recorded close by at 120 kilometres an hour. A yacht broke its mooring and washed up on the beach. I went to the coast in one of the strongest gales and the force of the wind was such that I could barely open my eyes.

Initially the dramatic weather was exciting, but as it continued week after week the experience became gruelling. With no central heating and poorly-fitted windows the house was dark, damp and cold. We had half a ton of holm oak and olive wood delivered, and became experts at managing the open fire in the sitting room. We also learned to fling open doors and windows whenever the rain stopped, to air the house and keep it dry.

When Christmas came we joined our respective families in Cornwall and Almeria. Returning to Mallorca on New Year’s Eve, it was as if we’d come back to a different place. The sun was shining, the sky was azure and the temperature was nudging 20 degrees. Elaine arrived from Los Angeles, Arthur arrived from Paris, we celebrated the last day of the year with Alejandro DJing on a tiny portable speaker.

At 4am on New Year’s Day we went out into the garden to discover a thick fog had settled over the plain, cloaking the landscape in swirling dampness. In the motionless air we could hear music from half a dozen other parties, spanning a range of several miles in each direction. The music was mingled with the sound of hundreds of cockerels crowing, near and far across the plain, as if adding their voices to the celebration. It was a magical way to begin the year.

January and February were sublime months. Day after day we awoke to clear skies, sunshine and birdsong. I spent the days working on a table in the garden, retreating inside only when the sun set behind Puig Maria and the temperature started to fall. A couple of times each week I took my laptop to a local beach, went for a swim in the chill, crystal-clear water, then sat on a rock in the sun and did my work.

We’ve been getting a lot of exercise. We hike at the weekends, exploring remote places in the mountains and coast. At twilight when we finish work we often do a circuit to the sea and back on our bikes. We’ve started weekly tennis lessons, a sport that Alejandro already plays well but which is new to me. Finally, inspired by Alejandro’s example, I’ve started going to a couple of yoga classes each week.

Between 1995 and 2015 I studied yoga devotedly, starting with Alaric Newcombe at the Iyengar Centre in Maida Vale, then continuing with a series of wonderful teachers. Having suffered knee problems as a child, I grew up with a terribly hunched posture and little confidence in my physical ability. Alaric was a demanding teacher and at first I found the classes a struggle. But with perseverance, yoga restored my posture, changed how I breathe, and gave me a new sense of myself as a physical entity. After twenty years of devoted study, I gradually drifted into other activities and allowed it to lapse. Picking it up again now is like being reunited with an old friend, and I realise how large a gap it left in my life.

The one sad note from these months is the death of Viola Nettle, my beloved piano teacher from Cornwall, aged 90. I studied with her from the age of 7 to 17. Along the way she became as much a friend as a teacher and we always remained close. Viola is the person who gave shape to my love of music, and instilled in me a curiosity for new sounds that will be with me all my life.

For the last decade, tragically, she suffered from alzheimer’s which progressively stripped away her memory and personality. The last time I saw her was February 2020 when I visited the care home where she was living. By this stage conversation was impossible, so I spent an hour playing the piano for her, including the whole of JS Bach’s Italian Variations, some Ravel I was working on, and a couple of pieces she’d taught me as a child. When the time came to say goodbye I kissed her on the cheek. She grinned and said “You naughty boy!”

: c :

[ 10:52 Friday 20 August 2021 – Esporles, Mallorca ]

Exactly twenty years ago today, I packed up my home in London and moved to the island of Stromboli. I planned on staying two months but ended up living there two years.

During that period on Stromboli I evolved the most productive working routine I’ve discovered to date. Each day comprised alternating periods of two-to-three hours’ intensive working, punctuated by half-hour periods swimming in the sea (in summer) or walking (in winter). I found that this rhythm enabled me to get a lot of work done, remaining consistently creative and without feeling tired at the end of the day. Coming back to London in 2003 I found it painful making the transition to working a regular eight-hour day in the office again.

A few days after arriving in Port D’Es Canonge last month, I realised that I’d automatically switched back into my Stromboli working pattern. The main difference now is that my routine includes several video calls a day, which didn’t exist in 2001. It took me a while to find a comfortable way to accommodate this new type of remote collaboration. My solution involves having a fixed point in the house where I do all video calls, and dressing slightly more smartly. I also found it best to avoid going directly from a swimming break into a video call, as the transition feels too abrupt. Another evolution from my 2001 working pattern is that I now keep my laptop on London time. Whenever I’m working, I shift myself psychologically into the London time zone. This avoids any sense of dislocation when I’m speaking with the team, and makes scheduling meetings easy. My phone, on the other hand, is set to local Spanish time.

From our house in Port D’Es Canonge it is a five minute walk to the little semi-circular cove, with dinghies pulled up on one side and a row of boathouses lining the rear of the beach. From here the wild rocky beach of Platja de Son Bunyola is ten minutes walk to one side, with the even wilder beach of Es Berganti fifteen minutes’ walk the other way, at the foot of a spectacular cliff. Most evenings a fierce katabatic wind appears without warning and whips around the trees and houses for half an hour before disappearing as suddenly as it came. Other than this wind and the ever-present cigales, the most prominent sound in the evening is the laughter and cries of Mallorquin children playing in the street.

After a month in Port D’Es Canonge, at the start of August we moved eight kilometres inland to a terraced house in the village of Esporles, high in the Tramuntana mountains. We appreciated the luxury of having shops and restaurants within walking distance, and being excused the ordeal of Port D’Es Canonges’ four kilometres of single-track road carved into the mountainside, with its horrendous sequence of twenty-nine hairpin bends.

However there is something magical about Port D’Es Canonge and despite its inconveniences we both miss it. Therefore on Monday we are packing our bags once again and moving back to Port D’Es Canonge, where we will remain until the end of September. After that the picture is hard to predict.

In 2001, as a citizen of the European Union, I was free to rent a house on Stromboli and stay for as long as I wanted. However in 2021 the situation is somewhat different. As a citizen of the United Kingdom, beyond the end of the Transition Period on 31st December 2020, I cannot remain in Spain more than three months without a visa.

When I researched the process last year it seemed straightforward so I gave it little thought. But when we arrived and I commenced the process to apply for an “Entrepreneur Visa”, the proverbial rabbit hole opened at my feet.

At this point I have had to obtain a document from the UK police stating I have no criminal record, get the document stamped with a “Hague Apostille”, get the stamped document translated into Spanish, get the translation stamped as well, request a certified copy of my degree certificate from Cambridge University, provide all my payslips for the past two years, get an official letter from The Trampery stating that I am an employee, provide a complete business plan for the project, provide a certificate proving I have purchased health insurance, submit photocopies of every page in my passport. As a passably intelligent English speaker there is no possibility I could have completed the process unaided. Alejandro has been heroic, but even for him as a native Spanish-speaker it has been an ordeal.

The greatest challenge was getting an appointment with the Spanish Consulate in London. By default every email to the contact address they provide is met with a lengthy and impenetrable automated message, explaining that the Consulate is not willing to reply to any question whose answer can potentially be found somewhere on the internet.

I would probably have given up after receiving this message three times, but fortunately Alejandro was cunning enough to apply for a different document, which elicited a human response, so he could then plead with them for an appointment, which has now been scheduled for 27th August.

If the Spanish Government doesn’t grant me an Entrepreneur Visa, we’ll come back to London at the end of September and work out a different route. The whole experience has been a bit disheartening, and drives home the appalling cost of the British population’s decision to leave the European Union. But despite the vicissitudes of the visa process, we feel privileged to be here and I haven’t regretted our decision for a micro-second.

: c :