AS we walked across the north Ibiza landscape, it was 29°C and even the lizards were seeking the shade.
We have been blessed with wonderful weather since we set down on this island off the Mediterranean coast of Spain some eight days ago. Sunny days and clear nights, with a moon like a segment of sucked lemon in the sky. We seem to be able to see two ploughs and the stars, which can’t, of course, be right, nor does it sound right. Sean O’Casey’s Joxer would have been even more intrigued had he seen two ploughs rather than one as he contemplated the celestial mysteries from the quarterdeck far out to sea.
The locals tell us it is exceptional that daytime temperatures have averaged 24°C this early April. Exceptional or not, it has brought out the blossom on the trees and the wildflowers everywhere.
I am immensely taken with the yellow-topped fennel plants that stand six and eight feet tall like sentries along the roadsides.
While there are asphodels, lupins and dandelions extraordinary, these tall fennels truly take the prize. I wish you could see them, heads as big as one’s hand made up of hundreds of small flowerlets — ‘umbellifers’ is the category to which they belong, like our Irish Alexanders, wild carrot or pignut. Fennel, of course, also grows wild in Ireland, although less extravagantly than here.
I wish you could also see the swifts hunting in packs over azure-blue coves where there are no buildings and not a human soul on the strip of sand as the evening sun catches the ocre cliffs and glances across the wings of the swifts, making them flash like spinning mirrors against the blue vault — and that they might hear their high-pitched calls as they quarter the sky in troops of two dozen or more, hawking insects.
As the evening lengthens, and the sun drops and light goes from the small beach and moves, metre by metre, higher up the enclosing sides, the swifts come down for some reason and hawk lower and lower over the surface of the still sea.
The Mediterranean, at least now, in this halcyon weather, does not crash in as it does in our west Cork coves or even rustle onto the sand, or even whisper — it makes no sound at all. We swim late: the air is still warm.
How kind is the nature here, while elsewhere in the world (I think of Japan) it can be so cruel, and the sea so violent.
How ever much we believe, that with our expertise, we can control these forces, we are still, as always, at their mercy.
As our Japanese friends attest, the forces of nature hold our lives in their power, much as we hold those of lesser creatures. One day, it rained and snails of many colours came out to graze.
Walking along wet field paths, we tried to avoid stepping on them and couldn’t but wince as we heard the soft scrunch beneath.
The birds are early in nesting and rearing here.
I saw a greenfinch feeding a fully-feathered fledglings and this explained the group of six kestrels I saw hunting together.
At first, I thought they might be Eleonora’s falcons, a species confined to these (Balearic) islands and a few other Mediterranean locations and characteristically hunting in groups — behaviour unusual for falcons.
But these were kestrels, parents and young, and exciting to watch as they skimmed and hovered over open land between the olive trees.
We make breakfast in the shared kitchen of the pension recommended to us by friends in a small village in the north of the island, and the scent of orange blossom wafts in from the trees outside the window. Also, the hullabaloos of the farmyard cock and the admonishing cluckings of his hareem of hens.
The pension costs €36 per night, a large, spotlessly-clean room with excellently-functioning bathroom and a roof-terrace as big as the room itself.
This, and a ticket on a notoriously cheap airline makes the holiday wonderfully affordable. We often eat out, at €25 for two main courses, a bottle of wine and a dessert.
While the cock crows and the hens squawk we hear our adopted heron (still on holiday in Galway) now struts about his makeshift aviary but hasn’t yet attempted to fly.
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, April 18, 2011
