'We walked the shores of La Laguna de Fuente de Piedra and Angel took many photographs. The flamingos posed. Angel put away her camera and the flamingos turned their backs and continued feeding. In the village we lunched fittingly on pink prawns and had the inevitable discussion on what makes a flamingo pink. I said it was their diet. Angel said it was a permanent state of embarrassment because of their wonky knees. I asked our young waitress who said we were both mistaken. It was the sun.

The sun turned them pink like the tourists. Her father behind the bar shook his head slowly and said we were all wrong. "The flamingos are pink because God made them so. How else would you know you were looking at a flamingo if it were not pink." Life in Spain. I could have stayed at La Laguna de Fuente de Piedra forever.' _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ After another northern winter in Blighty, I decided to fly to vernal Spain and pursue two half-formed ambitions. One was to loaf thermophilically under an Andalusian sun and the other, when not loafing, was to emulate a man called Ibn Abd al-Hakam.

Hakam was a 9th century Egyptian scribe who had chronicled the first ingressions of the Moorish invasion of southern Spain and I, somewhat ambitiously, had a notion to write an interrogation of the 20th century's touristic counter-part. I would find hitherto illusive parallels in both invasions and unearth timeless truths about human conflux. Hmm. As it gradually became clear to me that I was comically underqualified for this mission and had bitten off more paella and couscous than I could chew, with some reluctance I recalibrated my sights. Setting them considerably lower, I settled on chronicling my own time on Spain's sub-tropical coast whilst, naturally, retaining the loafing part of my original plan. (I was, after all, in the most agreeable land where tomorrow will always do.) Sandcastles in Spain is a light-hearted look at three years of an aspirant writer, caught on the horns of artistic procrastination and expat mores. It is also the result of a man conceding to his limitations whilst, incidentally, finding an angel.