Good to be back on the wide-open road again

WE DROVE across the bare Meseta, the tableland at the centre of Spain, on a Sunday morning, the sky big and blue overhead and snow-capped mountains on the horizon, rising above a band of blue mist.

As the sun burnt through, cars on the road far ahead winked in the sunlight and it was good to be back on the road again, as we used to be.

Aranjuez, Ocaña, Manzanares, Valdepeñas: now the road bypassed them and we were in a proper car, gliding along the wide and empty highway at 120, 130, 140km/h, passing the slow-moving, small convoys of French-registered bangers, driven by Moroccans making the long trek home for Christmas, roof racks stacked with bicycles, TVs, washing machines and God knows what, the kind of wagons in which we plugged across the pre-motorway roads of Europe all those years ago.

We stopped at a filling station near Jaen and sat in the warm afternoon sun in shirtsleeves. It was hard to get up and move on. After two days — crossing on the ferry from Rosslare to Cherbourg, then driving the length of France — we had, at last, caught up with the sun and, warm as it was in the car, it wasn’t the same as being out in the high plains of Spain. We hadn’t been so warm outdoors since Ireland in September.

We drove south-west and when evening came on, we noticed that the hillsides, covered in their rows of olive trees, were suddenly inscribed with cross-hatching, the low sun throwing the shadows of the trees in the first row onto the trees in the second row, and so on, so that the vast landscape was criss-crossed, as if some giant hand had drawn it so. The pools of shadow beneath the trees created the illusion that they were pinning down the earth in geometric squares, as if they were the ticking on a vast mattress that was the red earth of La Mancha and Castile.

In a restaurant in Aranda del Duero the night before, the waiters had brought a bed of flaming embers to the table beside us and the customers cooked themselves slices of raw meat. Could this happen in Ireland? And they were drinking and smoking at the same time! While, in Japanese restaurants, sukiyaki is cooked at the table by customers and, in Switzerland, fondue, give us Irish a fire on the table and, in the opinion of insurers, we will almost certainly set fire to the restaurant or ourselves. If not, we will probably undercook the meat and sue the restaurant for food poisoning. All this will justify premiums that no restaurant could afford.

This morning, here in our rented house in the Alpujarras mountains, south of Granada, I wake to notice that sunlight isn’t burning through the cracks in the shutters as it has every morning since we arrived. Looking out, I see that the surface of the bright, blue swimming pool is stippled with falling rain. Beyond, over the rain-slicked olive trees, lies a heavy band of mist. Through it I see that the slopes of El Lugar, as the peak to the south-west is called, is covered in snow — we are in the Sierra Nevada, the snow mountains, what else could we expect? Today, the tile floors are like ice in this house built to resist the fierce summer heat of these inland mountains, at the expense of harbouring in its floors and walls the winter cold.

I step out into the damp, fresh world of the olive groves and immediately notice birds foraging between the trees where there were none the days before, or none that I saw. There are goldfinches, with vivid gold wing bars, flocks of blackcaps (I have never seen them in flocks before), a robin, some chaffinches, a blackbird, all birds one might see in Ireland.

Today, perhaps they have come down from the white slopes to feed in the groves where there is no snow.

The days are warm as an Irish summer, but most nights we light a fire, usually without filling the room with smoke. The hard, dry olive wood logs left by the owner burn like tinder once they are alight.

We had a white Christmas, with sun-tanning sun, brilliant blue skies, the white villages on the Sierra slopes merging so perfectly with the snow as to be invisible. Many of the trees in the deep valleys still have leaves of red and gold, like one imagines Vermont in the autumn. On St Stephen’s Day, out on my brother’s farm south of Seville, we watched azure-winged magpies flit through the trees and four white storks making their stately progress across the sky.