I’m not saying Tenerife is perfect, I’m not saying the resort is the ultimate, I’m just saying its rather lovely, aided and abetted by the glorious sunshine. But it is faaaaaarrrrrrkkkkin noisy. Due to the almost infinite level of childage around the place. Which becomes so much ‘white noise’ (a scientific term, not a racist one) which you hardly even notice. Until it gets too hot, too steamy, too sweaty and you just dive into a swimming pool (there are many), between the kids and the inflatable sharks, crocodiles, Paw Patrol rings, Spiderman shit and unicorns, and… and…

Enjoy that Graduate moment. Cool, calm, underwater and, best of all, silence. From the immense decibelage that you’d stopped registering. And it is magical. Like a total sensory blast of karma making everything just perfect. Limited only by the capacity of your lungs.

And every time I do it, I am in ‘the Graduate’. The best film ever (almost), the scene when young Benjamin is being assaulted by all his parents’ obnoxious friends, shouting at where they think his future, as the recent eponymous ‘graduate’, might be best placed. So he, aka Dustin Hoffman, just plunges into the swimming pool and all goes so silent and peaceful that they actually play ‘the sound of silence’ from Simon & Garfunkel’s incredible soundtrack to the movie. For Americans. In case they don’t know what silence means. And, in that wonderful irony-vacuum which they live, need noise to tell them what the absence of noise really is.

That movie is a masterpiece. And thrust Dustin into the limelight he stayed in for the next 40 years, almost unchallenged as the absolute master of character. Only Al Pacino ever came close to a challenge but then he’d start shouting and he dropped back to number 2.

We have our own version of the sound of silence anyway, as Lila & Joey left for the airport. I’ll miss them terribly. Once the relief has worn off. You don’t have to be a grandparent to reconcile those two seemingly contradictory sentences. Any parent will get it too.

The younger daughter returned to Berlin yesterday so its Mel & I who will have to drink for 7 people at tonight’s New Year’s Eve ‘gala’. Which, experience tells us, means we’ll be in bed by 10.30.

Happy New Years

A xxxx