A Summer on the Costa Brava, Remembered
The small hotels, the harbour lights and the sound of a scooter at midnight. A short travel essay on the coast that inspired Sunshine Seasons.
The Costa Brava does not announce itself. You come around a bend on a coastal road and there it is — pine trees leaning towards the water, a small cove with three boats, a village the colour of warm bread.
The summer I remember most was the summer we did not plan. We had a small hire car, a bag of paperbacks, and a loose list of towns we wanted to see. We spent most evenings in the same square, in Begur, drinking a wine we could never quite name and watching the swifts turn overhead.
It was the summer I began to think seriously about writing again. Not because anything dramatic happened. Because nothing did. There was space, and space is what the Sunshine Seasons novels grew out of — the small, patient hours in which characters finally have room to speak.
I still go back. The scooter still goes past at midnight. The harbour lights still shiver on the water. And a page of a notebook, filled at a café table with the sun going down, remains one of the finest things a working life can offer.
