No alarms and no surprises, please

After seeing Goya in Madrid I train it to Barcelona and eat for two days at the crowded Boqueria market on Las Ramblas and at a tapas bar on nearby Ferran Street. The wine is crisp, the oysters fresh and the cheese sharp, the dates sweet and the tapas, who knows.

Somehow I’ve made hard work of Spain and on my second night in Barcelona I do a full night shift. My final belly ache is at four o’clock Sunday morning, my final fit ten hours later. Altogether I feed the porcelain pelican for about a day.

I rediscover the best time to drink is when you’re washed out from yawning in technicolour, that bittersweet fizzy lemon makes bile a palatable secretion, and that despite my miserable gut I am still better off dry retching in some ship’s cabin of a Barcelona hostel than singing Radiohead classics like I was a year ago in Melbourne, when I was sitting at work with my back to the Dandenongs.

I quit Spain after just two weeks and go back to Paris, where there are no alarms and no surprises. Except that Ian doesn't like George as a pseudonym, so George and Sarah re-become Ian and Melissa (see Travelling with Ernest II and Sometimes with One I Love).

I regenerate with cups of soup, plates of Melissa’s warm cottage pie, children laughing and conversations in English. After a few days I swallow two pints of English ale in a pub in St Germain and the day after I take the train to Berlin.