Yeah, Baby!

I’ve been in Ischia. We stayed in a sixties spa hotel that hasn’t been updated since its first guests snapped each other drinking gin in the very same formica chairs with their Leica M Series. To everyone’s disappointment, and despite booking the only hotel in Italy without air conditioning, I couldn’t simulate a heatwave.

My mother was not having it. She exhorted me to WATCH THE NEWS. 

“But I’m reporting from the front line!” I protested. “Of sun loungers! I’m right here, working on a mediocre tan, despite moderate cloud cover and a gentle breeze.” 

“Ah, strong winds, that must be the mistral. It was on the BBC.” 

“Probably not one of those then.” 

I could sense she was ready to repeat reports from Rhodes and decided to run out of battery. The problem with fires, is there’s always one somewhere. And if there isn’t, it can be lit, to make way for a wind farm, or prove housewives aren’t recycling in Beijing.

Ah, Rhodes! My friend’s lover drove through those fires to reach her. He was late, he was inflamed, he was forgiven. 

That’s what we need, I thought, closing my eyes, Men of Action. Men of Action see a fire as something to navigate for a woman. Men of inaction watch the tele with their life in their hands, worrying the world will end with their whimper. 

I woke, thirsty for gin, and with just enough oomph to order one. While I waited to be quenched, I watched a sexagenarian stretch. Each time she flexed her muscle, her skin rose, only to sink on the exhale, like a recalcitrant hand towel refusing to rest on its rail. 

Troubled by the certainty of decay, I soothed myself with more missives from my mother. Amongst her frantic messages I found a rational, BBC!-published, scientific account of the effects of 50-degree heat on the human body. Classic! Like finding a piece on the effects of crawling into a flaming pizza oven, if I was out for an Italian. 

Yeats called science the opium of the suburbs. It’s seeped into the city now, with all its dormitive virtues. My neighbours injected science to go on a holiday that science then scared them out of taking. If stability is in movement, I mused, squirting some Factor 15 on my knees, this sophistic case to pause is pregnant with instability. 

Back at the hotel, haunted by the memory of all that Time and skin tensing on the sand, I surrendered to the spa. For €25 a tired woman dragged out an old bucket filled with sludge and began painting over my middling tan in the communal shower cave. Abandoned on some kind of cot, I contemplated my situation: if the superstition is the mud, and the science is the cling film, the civilisation must be the ‘non entrare’ note sellotaped to the curling shower curtain. Civilisation makes it difficult to relax. Even though ours is an age of passivity. People are lazy, they’re too lazy to think, I thought, as I drifted back to sleep. 

I was woken by my boys giggling that they’d found me, and washed away the mud to find the same body beneath it. 

Outside, my phone pinged, “Forget Covid! People are dying of fear in Europe!” (a delightful Freudian slip), and pinged and pinged again, with wails of de-escalating alarm, as my mother noticed the dull skies in all the photos of her grandchildren.

“Wait, it looks cloudy?????!!!?!?” she exclaimed. Before encouraging me to have a wonderful holiday.