The author reads: audio clip

 

Last month I did a radio interview on Resonance FM in London, during which I read a couple of extracts from 300 Days of Sun. I was sent one of the extracts the other day, and I thought I would share it here: Deborah Lawrenson sets the scene in the town of Faro, from the opening of the novel.

 

It's only two minutes long, but while you're listening you might like to look at this photo I took early one morning from the top of the Hotel Faro looking over the Jardim Manuel Bivar towards the Old Town gates where the storks nest. The white structures are the food stalls that opened at night during the folk festival. In the foreground is the bandstand where Joanna meets Ian Rylands, and beyond the marina are the lacy green salt marshes and the islands. If you enlarge the photo, there is even a plane coming in to land. Hope you enjoy it!

 

 

Available at all good booksellers and from Amazon.

Portugal through foreign eyes

I confess, I was quite worried about what Portuguese readers would make of 300 Days of Sun when it was translated and published by Editorial Presenca over the summer. I hoped I had captured the essence of the country as the backdrop to my story but was well aware that the shadows lurking under the sunny surface might prove controversial. Had I gone too far, or simply got too much wrong?

For all that the British enjoy reading about themselves through foreign eyes - think how Bill Bryson has endeared himself to the nation with his mercilessly hilarious observations - I wondered how the proud Portuguese would react to a tale involving present day economic woes, wartime intrigue and several  real-life child disappearances on the Algarve coast.

To be fair, the two intertwined stories, past and present, concern the situations that foreigners in Portugal find themselves involved in, so their insights into the country are designed to be those of outsiders. First impressions are a key part of the narrative.

Well, apart from an opinion piece in the august Diario de Noticias, the Lisbon equivalent of The Times, in which Icelandic writer Yrsa Sigurdardóttir and I were the subject of a bit of a rant about foreign writers stereotyping the country's characters, possibly humorous, possibly not, hard to tell using Google translate and rudimentary word recognition - but great publicity for our books, so thanks for that - the reaction has been incredibly positive.

There was a lovely mention in SAPO's online summer crime reading round-up and here is a rough translation of a review from The Styland blog:

"The use of the town of Faro almost as a character is intense to the point of giving us details about our country which we probably never noticed but that the author somehow found them relevant to put in her book. And she does a fantastic job sending us mentally to all the scenarios with absolutely phenomenal descriptions. I confess that I had tears at times: but because the descriptions of our traditions are beyond reproach. It seemed as if the author lived here, but no. She just spent two weeks in Faro with her daughter, fell in love with our culture and managed to convey our story in a touching way."

In fact, many Portuguese reviewers and bloggers have loved the fact that the novel holds a mirror up to their country, with the reflection filtered through fresh eyes. I just adored this blog post by Fernanda on As Leituras da Fernanda (again, a very rough translation using Google):

"This book caught my attention for a simple reason: the fact that the author was not Portuguese. It seemed interesting to read about Portugal at the hands of a foreigner. Perceiving a little of what they see in this our little garden by the sea. And really, it did not disappoint me. I liked the author's voice very much. Very lyrical, but without pretentiousness, for the viewpoint of a simple tourist, not making value judgments, which is sometimes difficult for those who write. Although she never lived in Portugal she gives with enough consistency the Portuguese way of life, our traditions and our history." Though she does go on to write: "I'm just not sure she has understood what is missing." Now there's an intriguing suggestion - I want to know!

There was also a great review in the English language site Portugalist.

In the UK, 300 Days of Sun is available this month on the Kindle Monthly Deal promotion for only 99p. 

Algarve: This Shore is More

 

"Mykonos may be alluring, Ibiza tantalizing, and St Tropez may have the ultimate swagger, but the Algarve in Portugal is my port of call for dreamy, charming and authentic. And the light: at sunrise, it’s luminescent with shades of cotton candy and bluebells; at sunset, it dissolves listlessly into a canvas of tangerine and ink."    Scarlett Roitman

Isn't that a beautiful scene? I discovered Scarlett's blog through Instagram and was drawn immediately to her gorgeous descriptions of Faro and the coast, backdrop to many scenes in 300 Days of Sun.

The introduction to her post This Shore is More continues:

"I may not be a creature of habit, but when it comes to July and August, all roads seem to lead to the Algarve. I’ve been coming here for fifteen summers. My husband, Mark, and I loved it so much, we started developing properties here (and if you’re interested, visit www.thekeysatquinta.com). It’s a mere two and half hours from London, summer perfection is guaranteed (it averages 300 days of sunshine a year), and it truly has the most spectacular beaches in Europe. This is a canvas of whitewashed towns and villages, scented orange groves, rugged, russet coastline and biscuit-coloured sands."

 

You can carry on reading over on the Diary of a Londoness blog - and I strongly urge you to do so, for stunning pictures, some lovely writing and a glorious taste of the Algarve!

 

A sense of place



I never set out to write novels that were particularly known for their sense of place. I set out to write stories that rang true and that transported the reader into another place and time, drawn into authentic surroundings, experiencing what my characters were seeing and hearing, smelling and tasting.

 

As Simone de Beauvoir tells us in her autobiographical Force of Circumstance: “I do not mention the colour of the sky, the taste of a fruit, out of self-indulgence (…). Not only do [these details] allow us to apprehend a period and a person in flesh and blood, but by their non-significance they are the very touch of truth in a true story.”

 

This is the start of a guest post I wrote for Karen at My Reading Corner. If you'd like to read the rest, please hop over to her blog on this link. The photo above is of one of the lovely, yet abandoned buildings facing the marina in Faro in Portugal, setting for 300 Days of Sun.

 

A tough ask

 



It's always tricky when you put your book in front of reviewers who know far more than you do about a key component of your work. But it has to be done, as a kind of test. So I couldn't be happier that the verdict from the Algarve Blog is a resounding thumbs up for the setting and story of 300 Days of Sun.

 

"She has a brilliant way of describing minute details which bring a place to life, and makes you feel as if you are really sat in a local Portuguese café drinking a rich bica coffee and conversing with the locals."

 

You can read more on the Algarve Blog, and be charmed by the southern Portuguese backdrop in Alyson and David Sheldrake's fabulous photography and atmospheric posts. The following three photos are (c) Algarve Blog, reproduced here with permission.

 

 

 

 

300 Days of Sun: Behind the book

I am always inspired to write by the places I visit and Faro, on the southern coast of Portugal, was no exception. I had never been there before, though I knew the name from a hundred airport departure boards, as the hub for tourists travelling to the Algarve. My daughter Madeleine, then seventeen, was taking a Portuguese language course in the town. She and I were charmed from the first evening, by its mosaic pavements, by the laid-back atmosphere in the August heat, by the sea and the glimpses of green salt marsh. In the afternoons, we found various ways to get to the beaches and islands – and the first time we went to Praia de Faro, thanks to churning winds offshore, we did find the sea curiously green and furry as described in my novel.

For all the geographical accuracy of my portrayal of Faro, the town in this book is an imaginary version, and all aspects of the story are fiction. However, certain elements, like great storm of February 1941 and the re-opening of the Café Alianҫa during the local elections (held, in real life, in 2013), are superficially true. The storks' nests on dizzying ledges, as below, are also a characteristic feature.

It would be disingenuous to pretend that the heartbreaking disappearance of four-year-old Madeleine McCann from Praia da Luz in 2007 had no influence on this story, but what set off my narrative was a TV report of renewed investigative efforts to find her several years after the event. A woman who lived locally was being interviewed, and she was angry. “Why all the interest in this one case?” she asked. “There have been others too, you know. What about them?” It was an unkind reaction, I thought, but intriguing. Although I watched out for the next broadcast of the story, and the possibility that this woman’s implication had been followed up, she did not feature again.

I wondered why these questions were not pursued further. Perhaps the reporter hadn’t been able to find out more in the time. Perhaps the implications were too large, too unwieldy. It struck me that sometimes important questions are never answered. Sometimes they are uncomfortable, or not politically expedient. Worst of all, events might be deemed too long ago to matter. An old story: the most damning dismissal a news editor can give. But what are the families who have lost children in this way to do? Of course they will continue in their quests to rescue them, or to know what happened.

Running through this novel are questions about identity. It’s an issue that can be hard enough to answer in normal circumstances. But what happens if a child grows to adulthood and discovers he is not the person he thought he was? A personal history is undermined, shown to be misleading at best, psychologically shattering at worst.

And there are other ways for a person to become someone different. One is by living in a foreign country. This particularly interests me, as I was moved across Europe and Asia so many times as a child, that the simple question, “Where do you come from?” has no simple answer. Each different country left an imprint and memories of home. For Alva, in wartime Lisbon, the moment she changes her perception is when she realises that her husband has no intention of taking her “home” to America.

Crossing borders is a theme that threads through the story. During war, national borders are threatened by invading armies; they must hold to keep the illusion of safety. Historically, Portugal was a nation defined by her navigators and mariners who took to the seas to explore the globe. Present-day Faro has constant movement of planes and trains and cars and boats; the students taking the language course are looking to expand their horizons and move on; Nathan and Joanna are always on the move, on ferry boats and cars and on foot.

In the past, Esta Hartford’s book depicts Alva’s flight into the unknown and how quickly some people can adapt when they have to. The same is true of Nathan. Yet there’s also a sense of unease. Assuming new ways of life, confounding expectations and finding the inner resources to do so are not easy. Borders reflect personal security and psychological boundaries. What one finds within them can often surprise – and perturb – but new countries, new homes, always open a new perspective on the world.

Above all, I hope you enjoy the escape into a fascinating and atmospheric place. Available at good bookshops and Amazon. Thrilled by this review in Portugalist, the must-read site for Portugal.

The seeds of a novel

 

                        
A question I'm asked surprisingly often is, "Where do you get the ideas for your novels?" As someone who is always noticing things and wondering whether these would make a story, I always feel it's more a question of, "How do you decide which idea would make the best story?"

 

The seeds of 300 Days of Sun were sown when I traveled to Faro with my daughter Maddy, who had booked herself a two-week Portuguese language course there. She was only seventeen at the time and I felt I couldn’t allow her to go alone, though she would have done so, quite happily. While she went to class every morning, I wandered around the town with a street map, camera and my notebook. 

I am always inspired to write by the places I visit, and Faro was no exception. I had never been there before, though I knew the name from a hundred airport departure boards, as the hub for tourists traveling to the Algarve coast. Maddy and I were charmed from the first evening, by its mosaic pavements, by the laid-back atmosphere in the August heat, by the sea and the glimpses of green salt marsh. In the afternoons, we found various ways to get to the beaches and islands – and the first time we went to Praia de Faro, we did find the sea curiously green and furry, though this is not the usual state of affairs.

 

It’s important to say here that, for all the geographical accuracy of my portrayal of Faro, the town in this book is an imaginary version: certain elements, like great storm of February 1941 and the re-opening of the Café Alianҫa during the local elections (held, in real life, in 2013), are superficially true, but the story in the book is entirely fictional. If there are similarities with real life on the Algarve, this is only in order to give my story the tang of authenticity, though as ever, I have tried to describe the places as I found them, to transport the reader to an atmospheric and intriguing place.

It has been a long time coming, but a big thank you is due to the Portuguese Tourist Board in London. In June 1985, I was lucky enough to be invited on a press trip to Lisbon, Cascais and Estoril. I was a trainee reporter on the Kentish Times, a weekly newspaper based in South London. The trip was an adventure that began with a gathering of six or seven strangers in the departure lounge at Heathrow airport; we were to be escorted by a Portuguese guide with a twinkly smile called João and, in return for writing an article extolling the beauty of this area of Portugal’s Atlantic coast, we would be treated to a week of interesting trips and lovely meals.

 

We had a wonderful time. Everyone seemed to get along, and there was lots of laughter, including a running joke about sardines, though the details of that one have got away. We visited Setúbal, Óbidos, Belém and Sintra, and the pousadas, the medieval castles and convents that had been transformed into atmospheric hotels. We had dinner one evening at the Fortaleza do Guincho at Cascais, where we drank white port with ice as an aperitif. Here I am, in a collage of old photos (I loved those pink shoes).

 

Unfortunately, when I got back to England and wrote my piece, only four sparse, dull paragraphs made it into print with no photograph. I was so embarrassed that I never went to the trip reunion in London a few months later, not daring to face João again. So if anyone at the Portuguese Tourist Board should find themselves reading this book, may I say Obrigado and apologize for making you wait so long for some words that do Lisbon and Cascais justice.

 

 

The Grand Café in Faro

 

"The town was full of strangers and constant movement: planes overhead, roaring in and out of the airport across the shore; boats puttering in and out of the harbour; trains sliding between the road and the sea; buses and cars; pedestrians bobbing up and down over the undulating cobblestones.

The café, at least, was still. On the way to the language school, it had the presence and quiet grace of an ancient oak, rooted to its spot in the Rua Dr. Francisco Gomes. The columns and balustrades of its once-grand fin de siècle façade had an air of forgotten romance that was hard to resist. I pushed against its old-style revolving door that first morning simply because I was curious to see inside."

 

                                                                    from 300 Days of Sun

 

The Café Alianca in Faro was once one of the town's great meeting places, a cosmopolitan establishment where the great and the good would drop by to see who else was there. When I visited in August 2013, it had been closed for several years but had re-opened temporarily to host meetings and discussions during the local elections. The café plays a crucial role in 300 Days of Sun, both in the present and the past stories.

 

 

Stork in flight

 

First new blog post for ages, I know, but I wanted to leave the Goodreads giveaway up as the first one on the page, and it ran for almost the whole of January. I've been busy too, trying to get a new book off the ground as well as all the real-life matters that don't seem to stop just because I'd like to sit down and write. As far as the blog is concerned, I think I'm going to do what I did in the lead-in to publication of The Lantern, all those years ago when I started this blog. That is, post little and often, with glimpses into the background of the upcoming novel due out in April.

 

So here we are, in this picture, on the salt marches in the sea at Faro, on the Algarve coast of Portugal. The landscape is home to thousands of storks that make their nests anywhere you care to look up in the town, in the recesses of church windows and roofs, on the pediment of the Old Town gates. If you look carefully, there's a stork in flight in the top left of the photo, cropped as much as I can without losing too much focus.

The first evening I was here, I started to notice how most of the streetlamps were tufted with dried grasses and twigs. Then I saw more ragged wigs on church porches and high ledges. I assumed it was yet more evidence of neglect, that weeds had seeded and been left to grow in sandy crevices, but as I began to study them more carefully, I figured it out. They were birds’ nests. There was one high on the stone pediment of the gatehouse to the Old Town, a great wheel of grasses, big as a tractor tyre. I looked up as I passed. I was lucky. I caught a movement inside the wheel, then a powerful white wing extended and then folded in on itself.

 

                                                                    from 300 Days of Sun

 

PS. Hmm, now I've had another look at the picture, I'm wondering whether it actually is a stork! This one definitely is, pictured from a ferry boat making its way through the maze of marshy islands. Apologies to any expert ornithologists!

 

 

Giveaway!

 

Would you like to be in with a chance of winning an early copy of 300 Days of Sun which comes out on April 12? There is a book giveaway thanks to HarperCollins over at Goodreads, running until January 27. US readers only, I'm afraid.

 

I'm supposed to be writing another book, but guess what? I've found a diversion - one that has taken me a bit by surprise. Urged by my US publishers to get myself on to Instagram (which I have to say, I wasn't thrilled about, mainly because I didn't know how it worked and thought I could only do it using my phone), I've spent the past few days completely obsessed with looking at pictures online and experimenting with creative ways of presenting my books and interests. Here's this morning's effort, what do you think?

  

There are tons of bookish and travel groups on Instagram, all with some pretty amazing photography, and needless to say I have not only learned a lot, but frittered away plenty of time too. However, if anyone wants to join me and interact on Instagram - and I will post slightly different photos there, though I've worked out how to make use of the older photos stored on my blog too - then you can find me @deborah.lawrenson and here is the link. Hope to see some of you there! 

 

  

Be one of the first to read!

 

Faro, Portugal, setting for the opening of my forthcoming novel, 300 Days of Sun. Over on my facebook page, HarperCollins US are offering the chance for three readers to win an very early copy of the book, in bound galley proof. If you're on facebook, please do check it out. The book is going to look beautiful and here are some photos to set the scene and a taster of what's inside, from (almost) the start:

I met Nathan Emberlin in Faro, southern Portugal, in August 2014.

At first, I thought he was just another adventurous young man, engaging but slightly immature. His beautiful sculpted face held a hint of vulnerability, but that ready smile and exuberant cheekiness eased his way, as did the radiant generosity of his spirit, so that it wasn’t only women who smiled back; people of all ages warmed to Nathan, even the cross old man who guarded the stork’s nest on the lamppost outside the tobacconist’s shop.

Yes, he appeared from nowhere – but then, so did we all. I didn’t go to Faro to get a story. That summer, I was on the run, or so it felt; I was trying to consign an awkward episode to my own past, not to get entangled in someone else’s. Besides, a lot of people I met in Faro were in the process of change, of expanding their horizons and aiming for a better life. The town was full of strangers and constant movement: planes overhead, roaring in and out of the airport across the shore; boats puttering in and out of the harbour; trains sliding between the road and the sea; buses and cars; pedestrians bobbing up and down over the undulating cobblestones.

 

 

The café, at least, was still. On the way to the language school, it had the presence and quiet grace of an ancient oak, rooted to its spot in the Rua Dr Francisco Gomes. The columns and balustrades of its once-grand fin-de-siècle façade had an air of forgotten romance that was hard to resist. I pushed against its old-style revolving door that first morning simply because I was curious to see inside.

 

I went up to the main counter, into an aromatic cloud of strong coffee, where a group of men knotted over an open newspaper. The barman, wiping his hands on an apron that was none too clean, seemed to be engaged in voicing his opinion and was in no hurry to serve me.

Photographs of old Faro were set into wooden panelling: black and white scenes of a fishing community, of empty roads and dusty churches. The argument at the bar counter intensified, or that’s what it sounded like. It’s not always possible to tell in a foreign language. It might just be excitability. But some words were easy to understand. Contra a natureza. Anorma. Devastador.
 

 

So, if you'd like to be one of the first to read on, there's still time to get your name in the draw. Good luck - and I'd love to know what you think. The publisher's catalog copy is here, and we've had the first blurb from the lovely and very generous Erika Robuck, author of the fab Hemingway's Girl and The House of Hawthorne among other seriously good reads:

 

"With its lush settings, high-stakes suspense, and novel-within-a-novel, 300 DAYS OF SUN delivers a labyrinth of complex relationships the reader is both breathless to solve and eager to return to upon completion. I lost sleep reading this fabulous, haunting novel."

 

Cover reveal: 300 Days of Sun

Ta-da...isn't it glorious? I am very happy indeed. The picture shows the dramatic rocks on the Algarve coast in southern Portugal, where the novel is set - and I hope it makes you want to plunge into the book as well as that sea.

The scratchy, scuffed effect and the lettering reminiscent of the 1950s is perfectly in tune with the story, too. Central to the action is a book published in 1954, written by a young American woman married to a foreign correspondent, based on her experience of wartime Lisbon, her travels in the south, and the aftermath of a time when the Allies and the Nazis faced each other across the casino tables and restaurants of supposedly neutral Portugal.

It's a story about borders and the transforming effects of crossing them, either willingly or unwillingly; the way altered geography and shifts of power change our lives. As I wrote, the story took on a thriller-ish feel, which made it exciting to write. Above all, there's a strong sense of place and atmosphere, with an evocation of a dangerous yet fascinating era.

Before publication - which is not until April 2016 - I will post up the start and various extracts, but for now I will leave you with the HarperCollins catalogue introduction. Fingers crossed it leaves you enticed.

Combining the atmosphere of Jess Walters’ Beautiful Ruins with the intriguing historical backstory of Christina Baker Kline’s The Orphan Train, Deborah Lawrenson’s mesmerizing novel transports readers to a sunny Portuguese town with a shadowy past—where two women, decades apart, are drawn into a dark game of truth and lies that still haunts the shifting sea marshes.

Traveling to Faro, Portugal, journalist Joanna Millard hopes to escape an unsatisfying relationship and a stalled career. Faro is an enchanting town, and the seaside views are enhanced by the company of Nathan Emberlin, a charismatic younger man. But beneath the crumbling façade of Moorish buildings, Joanna soon realizes, Faro has a seedy underbelly. And Nathan has an ulterior motive for seeking her company: he is determined to discover the truth involving a child’s kidnapping that may have taken place on this dramatic coastline over two decades ago.

Joanna’s subsequent search leads her to Ian Rylands, an English expat who cryptically insists she will find answers in The Alliance, a novel written by American Esta Hartford. The book recounts an American couple’s experience in Portugal during World War II, and their entanglements both personal and professional with their German enemies. Only Rylands insists the book isn’t fiction, and as Joanna reads deeper into The Alliance, she begins to suspect that Esta Hartford’s story and Nathan Emberlin’s may indeed converge in Faro -- where the past not only casts a long shadow but still exerts a very present danger. 

Amazon:  http://bit.ly/1JZun00 

Barnes & Noble:  http://bit.ly/1VQotDY 

Books-a-Million:  http://bit.ly/1FzRudB 

iBooks: http://apple.co/1FzRytU 

Indiebound:  http://bit.ly/1O3YWWj

Light at the end of the tunnel

 

Phew. I made the deadline and delivered the first draft of my new novel this week. I have no idea how good, or bad, it is. That's not false modesty, or disingenuousness; I genuinely don't know. Before I send it, I always print out the first draft because hard copy reads differently from the words on the screen. I don't know why that should be, but that's how it seems to me. No matter how many times I go over and over the text on screen - and I am a constant self-editor - I want to see it in the cold, hard light of day.

 

So I print out, only single-spaced so it looks more like a finished page in a book, rather than the double-spaced manuscript that publishers and agents want to see. Then I edit again on paper, as the world's most critical reader.

 

As such, I find some parts are better than I expected - and some are far worse. It's much easier to judge the pace and the amount of attention given to various aspects of the story when it's on paper. It may be different for other people, but this is how it is for me. I thought I had wrapped up the ending quite well, but last Sunday I ended up not doing a light polish of the text as I'd hoped, but writing 2,300 additional words to expand what now seemed rushed.

 

At this stage the book has taken over all rational thought. I consider the mundane necessities of life like going to the supermarket to be outrageous intrusions. I resent leaving my desk to answer the door or the telephone. All I can think about are the loose ends: the tiny plot and character issues that need to be tied up, the small mentions that ought to be recalled for proper satisfaction. I scribble these down on bits of ripped paper, newspaper, anything and put them in a pocket for decoding later.

 

At the end of this process, I make the changes on screen. It still seems extraordinary to be able to fit an entire book in a computer document, attach to an email and press send. It took me a whole day to print out my first novel, put it in the box the computer paper had come in, parcel up and take it to the post office!

 

So now I wait. (That part hasn't changed.) My editor in New York told me immediately that she is immersed in another project for the next few weeks, so not to expect a response for a while. I couldn't be happier. That's a fortnight's relaxation and decompression at least. As regular readers know, I have had a tough time to write through but now the pressure has lifted. It feels like a long time since the story began with a new place to explore and random observations in a notebook.

Writer's unblock

 

Monday morning, rain is lashing down as it has done for months, I can see again (and I'm still at the stage of really appreciating it rather than taking it for granted) and I'm at my desk trying to get down to some writing. But I'm just not in the mood.

 

I keep looking out of the window, and going downstairs to check on our leaks and drips. The countryside here is a bit flood-y, but nothing worse than saturated ground and controlled holding of water in the valley. On the television news are awful pictures of the West Country and the Thames Valley where villages are sinking in the rising water. People are angry and upset, and they have every right to be.

 

In the hope of inspiration, I've been looking through my photos of Faro, taken last summer for local details that might help the new book along. This one got me thinking. It's not just the bright light and shocking pink of the flower, but the way the tree has grown too big for the pot and the front part has been broken off leaving a cross-section of what normally wouldn't be seen. I like the sense of looking inside. The point is, that we can contain nature for only so long.

 

One of the themes in the Faro novel will be the shifting sands of the outlying islands that are constantly being redrawn by the force of the Atlantic drift along southern Portugal. I'm wondering now whether the south-westerly storms have had an effect there too. Time to do some internet research. I think I'm ready to start work.

 

Faro notebook

Back from Portugal and looking through the notes made and photos taken in Faro. Will any of the material eventually transform into part of a published novel? At this stage, I have no idea. The ideas I have are vague and constantly shifting. The only way to find out if they work will be to sit down, start writing and see what happens.

When I'm in a place, I like to engage with the details that I might not remember when I sit down at the desk to write. Surprisingly often, the pursuit of these details leads seamlessly to the bigger picture - the geography, the atmosphere, conversations with the locals. Take the gate to the Old Town, for example, just visible in the picture below at the far end of the Jardim Manuel Bivar.

After a few days wandering around the town looking up at the pretty Moorish-inspired buildings, I started to see dried grass hanging below streetlamps and rooflines. On closer inspection, these were birds' nests. Then I started to see wheels of grasses and twigs on churches - they were everywhere, including on the pediment of the Old Town gate (below). One evening, there was a flutter of white wings inside.

 

But which birds were making them? As an ex-journalist, I'm not shy of asking when I want to know something, rather to my daughter's embarrassment on occasion. ("Mum! Did you have to ask the hottest waiter what that music was?!" "Yes. And did he not bring me over a written note of the CD title? That's the way to do it.")

 

So I asked a cosmopolitan-looking local (many Portuguese speak excellent English) and was told they were storks. We chatted for a while under the gate and I found out that it's illegal to remove the nests as storks mate for life and only build one nest. They sleep there each night, bedding down at sunset, and the storks have always been in Faro as it's so close to their food supplies on the salt marshes of the Ria Formosa, now a natural park between the coast and the barrage islands fronting the Atlantic. 



Another story in the details that was hard to miss was the economic woe of Portugal, an issue they share with several other southern countries of the European Union. As someone who loves Europe and its people but not the EU political construct and the dead hand of its bureaucracy, I noted the evidence of closed businesses and decaying houses for sale with sinking heart.

 

I've never seen such pretty cobbled pedestrian streets, though; lining them, shops selling very cheap fashion items - clothes a third or a quarter of the price of similar items in the South of France - and great bags for around ten euros. (Naturally, we did what we could to help out economically...)

 

Faro beach was a half hour bus or ferry ride away. This is a view from the ferry, which was our preferred option. On the salt flats were tiny fishermen's huts, and constant fishing activity, whether from small rowing boats or the backbreaking work of clam digging.

  

 

Finally, a snap taken on Farol, part of one of the barrage islands, sandy spits of land that are constantly being pulled and reshaped by the strength of the Atlantic Ocean along the southernmost points of continental Portugal. The beaches are superb, the water clear and cold. And just look at that sky.

 

 

And the answer is...

...Portugal, as you many of you who left comments on the blog deduced! But not Lisbon. I'm in the far south in the pretty sea town of Faro, the capital of the Algarve.

Moorish influences abound - the buildings decorated with patterned tiles and wrought-iron balconies, the strongholds from the Middle Ages, the searingly bright sun - which is probably why so many of you who left guesses on the facebook page thought it was Morocco or Tunisia. We have also been in the grip of hot air blown up from the Sahara, according to the Algarve Daily News.

Here's a photo, purportedly of me, taken by Maddy yesterday on the Isle of Farol, where the lighthouse which gives the town its name is flanked by dazzling beaches. There's no doubt what was most important at that moment!