A very late state to our last day in Sitges. The alarm was set to go off at eleven, so of course we missed breakfast and the maids were already knocking on the doors. We left them to it, heading out for Chiringuito for a breakfast of Coke and cheese sandwiches as we read our books in the shade.

It’s certainly been far hotter today, and even the sea, during the six hours we spent at the beach, has been warmer than the pool at the gym. It has also filled with fish since yesterday; perhaps they are attracted by the tepid shallows. Most are small, but a few - the easiest to see - are a foot long and look like sand-coloured trout.

They swim with swift purpose and make no effort to avoid your feet and legs. Instead they swim right into them and then wiggle past quickly as they run the full length of their body along your skin, like a cat marking its scent.

All of this, and the mild sunburn I have under my left arm, is in spite of the fact that the weather maps are showing an ugly front running down through France to the Pyrenees and up from the Costa Del Sol almost to where we are, leaving Sitges and Barcelona in a little dry pocket on the coast.

But beyond that there were no beach revelations. Nothing out of the ordinary, but a relaxing day, through much of which I slept, missing big chunks of my German lessons, after which I went out for a last wander to take pictures of the church.

That afternoon sleep didn’t make me feel any less tired in the evening, though, when the four of us did our best to recreate the excitement of our first evening.

After drinking as much as we could of what remained of the litre of vodka we’d bought at the start of the week we headed out onto the streets and walked down onto the seafront to hunt out the paella restaurant we’d eaten at a week ago.

I suppose calling it a restaurant is giving it a sense of grandeur it really doesn’t deserve, but it has tables and chairs and food so it almost qualifies.

Only tonight, rather than bangers in the streets, the roads were filled with growling Harley Davidsons, and Jon told how he’d seen a report on the Spanish news about a whole load of Hog riders from America arriving on a boat that afternoon for a Harley Davidson convention.

They roared up and down the front, their farty growl splattering the hotels and restaurants with an ugly, messy noise, as we did our best to ignore them and enjoy our food, which was sadly lacking in comparison to what we’d eaten there first time around.

Perhaps over the week we had all embellished our memories, of perhaps it really wasn’t as good this time around, but that doesn’t get over the fact that the order was part wrong first time around, and then delivered in strange batches when it finally arrived so that we were all eating at different times.

Still, it was filling, and like last time we left the table feeling stuffed, happy to walk it off.

We headed down to the little garden in the square where the wild cats live, and then on to look at the beach for one last time. It was hidden away in the dark of the night, but as we stood on the cliff-top and looked down our eyes slowly grew accustomed to the dim moonlight and we could make out the midnight swimmers paddling out into the surf in their underwear.

Deeper in the cove, where the sand is dry and the curve of the cliff keeps out the wind, kids were letting off rockets that streaked up into the sky, tearing apart the darkness with a thin phosphorous line of exhaust, and then exploded into a million white-hot fragments that rained down on the swimmers in the sea. The swimmers looked up, watching the beautiful sight, and then ducked down unde the gentle waves at the last minute to avoid being burned.

At one point the kids threw a whole handful of bangers on the fire - it was half one now and at home all would be safely tucked up in bed - and they exploded with the sound of a world war battlefield. The whole cove was lit up by brilliant disco flashes of red and green, and the kids jumped back towards the water, the explosions strobing their eager faces.

It was a beautiful way to see the beach for the last time, and somehow fitting. A celebration of the good times we had spent there over the last seven days, organised and played out by someone else.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 27th, 2003 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.