There are worse jobs

Oh, all right, sometimes the writing life IS glamourous. A bit.

My last day in Dubrovnik started with a cappuccino at a café near the Ploče gate end of the Stradun (the main, white marble street of the old town). There, sitting in the sun, I did an hour of work on the filmscript. Then a  break, a stretch, a move into the shade... I ordered a coffee with cream, in Croatian (kafa sa slagom) and got an enthusiastic and unironic "Bravo!" from the waitress, which made me blush (and think, hmmm, the average tourist mustn't try very hard here). I did an hour's work on my Prospect column.

Then I wandered the hundred yards or so to the Gradska Kavana (the City Café), where I was due to meet the wonderful Croatian actor Niko Kovač. Everybody knows him, so the waitress led me over to him (we'd only ever talked on the phone before). Soon we were joined on the terrace by those I love, and we all drank more coffee and tea and talked of disgraceful and amusing things. Niko is recovering from throat cancer, and thus of course talked more than all of us, pressing on a valve in his throat to do so. Splendid stories of Tom Stoppard, of Peter Brooks,  of legendary performances of Chekhov in the former Yugoslavia, of doing Beckett during the war as Yugoslavia ripped apart, in a blacked out theatre in the rubble of Dubrovnik. The tales were enhanced if anything by the whispering, hissing delivery.

Then later an idyllic couple of hours drinking on the cliffs outside the city walls, at Café Buža (well, one of two such cafés... Buža just means a hole in the wall...) Down the steps to the sea with the ones I love, and a quick swim in the Adriatic... I hadn't thought to bring swimming togs, but so what.

I looked back, over turquoise water, at the towering medieval walls, nougat in the sunlight. Hard to believe that, during the most recent war, REM were in the charts... (it was the worst of times - Vanilla Ice, Color Me Badd, Michael Bolton, Bryan bloody Adams at number one forever with (Everything I Do) I Do It For You)... I  couldn't help but remember, as I swam, that in 1991 people swam here even in December, just to stay clean, because the shelling had cut off the water in the city.

There are worse jobs. There are worse lives.