At about 6pm I thought to myself, “Ah well, I’d better get up the hill and see that the sun sets,” After another day of sloth it only seemed right that I did some work. And for this week at least my job is to sit on a bench, drinking beer and eating satay and checking that the sun goes down at the end of the day. It’s quite a good position to have. I am hoping that I can make it my new career when I get back home, though I’m not sure who I will get to pay me for it. Perhaps I might convince some stupid religious people that if I don’t sit drinking beer and eating fried animals coated in peanut sauce and check the sun down off on my clipboard that it might not happen and the world will be doomed to perpetual day. Which isn’t all that scary really. If my job was to ensure the sunrise then that would be a bit more frightening.
Anyway, I must have done my job well as the sun went down, so no-one can accuse me of shirking. And it’s good to see that I am being seen as a kind of mysterious maverick figure in the hotel. The woman who brought me my beer said “You very quiet!” Ha! If only she knew. “You always on your own!” It would have been hard to explain that my unsociability is a deliberate decision on my part and that I am appreciating the solitude, so I just smiled and told her I was OK. I am still enjoying being cut off from the world. I haven’t brought my phone with me and though I am checking my email intermittently and loading up this shit, I am probably on the internet for only 15 minutes a day, rather than my usual 15 hours. I am almost exactly the same as Robinson Crusoe, alone on a desert island, apart from the fact that there are dozens of other people here, some of whom serve me food and alcohol and clean up my room for me. But apart from that it is the same.
I read “The Time Traveller’s Wife” today, which is a book I picked up at the airport to complete my three for two offer. It’s not my usual kind of book, but thought it might be fun for the beach. And indeed it was entertaining and an original idea extremely well executed. It is a very rare thing in that it’s a time travel book in which people are unable to change events in the past and thus make everything OK. It will doubtless be made into a film, probably starring Jude Law is my guess. It’s the longest book I have read this holiday, but it was gripping and I managed to finish it by the evening. I stayed up a little later today, but tiredness gripped me and I again missed dinner. The fact that I am not getting hungry despite the loss of a meal would suggest that I am eating easily enough during the day. I am sleeping really well though and getting increasingly relaxed and this is what I wanted from this holiday. I am also, as usual, going pink in blotches in the sunshine, but no serious burning as yet. It was really hot today, but I hid under an umbrella most of the day. In the evening it rained, though I wouldn’t mind a cool day tomorrow as the heat was a little oppressive.
I have also totally lost track of what day of the week it is. I have just looked it up on the computer and am amazed to find that today was a Saturday. I will almost certainly try and do some stuff next week, but my lack of adventurous spirit is appealing to me a bit and IÂ’d quite like to see if I can keep it up til next weekend and be remembered in the hotel as the strange man who said and did nothing, apart from ticking a piece of paper every night when the sun went down.
