Sandcastles in the sky

The idols of my teenage years have fallen. Kate Moss is on the wagon, her face furling up like a wizened apple, testament to decades of Malboro lights, sun exposure and gin tasting as good as skinny feels. Johnny Depp has lost his cool. Pheonix and Cobain, of course,  kicked it before I’d even exited my formative decade, contributing to a fear of the hard stuff that stayed with me at least until after uni. Like the eventual ignominy of the popular kids at school, the costs of being beautiful when young are paid back at steep interest. 

Luckily for me, at fourteen, braces firmly attached in a metallic grin that glinted in the sun, and made the perils of puberty all the more painful, I was not so fortunate. Though,  as my mother often commented, I had a body like Moss, and I casually spent my Portuguese summers in little more than bikini bottoms, desperate for curves to erupt instead of acne. They did, and then some, although it would be years before my skin calmed, and finally, now I’ve achieved my teenage dream of being as comfortable in my skin- pockmarked and dimpled though it undoubtedly is – as Kate, the years have been kinder, or perhaps it is I who am now kinder to myself? In any case, I barely care, now I have no one but my husband, and those on Facebook who still follow me despite a relentless aesthetic of cheery family snaps, to notice it. Other priorities have taken precedence. 

Now, returning 10, 14, even 30 years since I first stepped foot in the Portuguese resort where I learned to swim, got my first period, snogged my first crush, drank my first cocktail and suffered the subsequent debut hangover; where I fought battles with my late stepfather,  and swotted up for my A levels, and read eighteenth century tomes for my degree, it says somethings for how much has changed that the holiday aroma is no longer of B & H and carrot oil but menthol vapour and a high factor lotion that’s both paraben and fragrance free. Perhaps this might yet save me suffering the same fate – of the now tragic la Moss and late step-father both. 

Now, the resort which in the late 80s and 90s seemed the epitome of taste and which gave me respite from the twin purgatories of homework and playground unpopularity, is, much like myself, a little tired: marred by mismatched furnishings, imported bread and a staff who no longer greet me with a familiar smile but rather a practised cynicism – perhaps an anti-English sentiment has crept in with the devaluation of the pound. (I later learned there were not bough migratory summer workers, and despite good wages, they simply couldn’t get enough staff- those that were left were putting in gruelling 16 hours days to keep the place running- a cautionary tale if ever there was one.)

The EU hangs from a thread just a year before roaming charges were due to be made illegal and it’s only now, well-thumbed copies of Vogue replaced by books on high finance,  I realise how inevitable it all has been, in the same way as I now realise how pointless an English degree has been. My holiday reading this year is not Jilly Cooper, nor Gone with the Wind, which filled my lovelorn teenage heart with such nonsense and early twenties with poor relationship choices, nor unfathomable Chaucer or earnest George Eliot; it’s Greek finance minister Yanus Varoufakis’ book on the EU superstate’s  origins and flaws, “And the weak suffer what they must”; now I too am a paid up civil service lackey with an interest in Government bonds and pension funds, not a famous novelist as once, on superior sun loungers, I dreamed. It’s not exactly where I thought I might be ten, fifteen years ago, when I came hereas a wayward teen or even as a first time mother, the pinnacle of youth’s arrogant freedom escaping me save for a stolen fumble with a gawky Italian because of a boy who stole my heart for keeps. But the joys of accumulating permenant lines and some general wisdom mean, I’m actually okay with it. That I spend my weekdays up to my eyeballs in banal copy and office politics makes me appreciate my holiday all the more. 

Aside from poorly chosen replacement decor, little has changed at Jardim Do Vau on the Algarve’s searing midriff: an oasis that encapsulates western civilisation’s late 80s peak, when the newly minted middle classes could afford two weeks regular foreign travel, and a recently unshackled continental population ingratiatingly received British money, and even a standard apartment was airy and came with daily maid service to scrub its marble floors. 

Today, taking a holiday abroad at all feels increasingly like an unpayable debt, thanks to wage deflation and the aforementioned weakness of the pound; and outside the resort, arrested development and increased graffiti, as well as the return of the once familiar Portuguese beggar, pay homage to a decade’s Eurozone austerity. Of more recent developments’ positives, at least my newly shellaced toenails don’t chip in the sand. 

These days, if I can be said to channel anyone, it’s slightly dishevelled late era Marilyn, rather than waifish 90’s pseudo grunge.

But what’s stayed the same is comforting amid so much change, although it’s telling too how few English kids play in the pool this year. My own, older now than I was when I first I came, have been subject to their own trials and tribulations of moder life, and it’s good to watch them unfurl in the blazing sun, wearing rather more protection than I once did. Perhaps their own frowns, thirty or so years hence, will be less pronounced because of it. Though the amount of time spent pouring over Minecraft on small screens, albeit under shade, doesn’t bode all that well. 

I can’t help feel, though, in time, their own idols will be less frivolous than mine once were – seriousness is this generation’s most novel feature and economists are the new rock stars, while a more sober breed of politician hopes to avert a more lurching crisis than the one that has so far reduced my generation’s cheap two weeks in the sun into a rather harder to come by one. And yet, as flights grow ever more expensive and July temperatures continue to soar, as last decade’s European sunblock wreaks havoc on Australasian coral, I don’t doubt, they too will look back on this time and place through an Insta-filtered haze and hope, when they bring their own children back, the air still smells of pine and orange blossom, and Tom and I are both still here to enjoy what’s left of it with them.