Letting Go
Madrid. Just looking at the name on cheap holiday search engines made me tingle with excitement. South European heat, blue skies, sun pouring down onto warm squares. I booked to fly the very next day. I’d never thought of myself as impulsive: I like to consider things through, work out each possible line of attack before I make a move. It’s part of my training as a novelist: you have to be certain that what you are going to do works before you spend time doing it. Are the through-lines of the plot coherent? Would Character X act in such a downright filthy manner? So to book a flight leaving the very next morning to a city in a country I’d never visited: outrageous! (Okay, it was only Madrid, not Montevideo or Mogadishu, and okay Madrid is probably very safe and familiar to someone familiar with any other European city, but the point still holds, the act was impulsive, somewhat rash and possibly foolhardy.) Madrid though. I landed late. The flig...