HOW THINGS TURN OUT

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‘Who’s the funniest writer you’ve ever read?’ a woman asked me the other day in a hotel in Tenerife where I’d gone to recuperate from a London chest infection. I always seem to be recuperating from something these days. But I guess that beats dying from it.

Alona, the woman told me her name was. Unless she was telling me she was alone. My Spanish isn’t what it was.

I didn’t have to think twice about who I thought was the funniest ever writer, though. ‘Dickens,’ I replied. I have loved Dickens since I was a small boy, wanted to be him, wanted to look like him, wanted to wear fancy waistcoats like him, and of course wanted to write like him.

We were sitting at opposite ends of the hotel library, Alona and I. Not many books on the shelves or tables. Just discarded thrillers and guides to the local flora. And in the chairs a number of Germans sleeping. The hotel guests were for the most part elderly and in need of cheering up. This lady more than most. She was conspicuously solitary and would wander between the breakfast tables as though looking for someone she knew she would not find. She held her head high, wanting everyone to see she was stricken. Her skirt was too short, I thought. And she wore too much make-up. Was she being the younger self who had come to this hotel many years before in the company of a man who adored her?