I should have been in Dubrovnik now. I accepted even before the lockdown that Covid-19 would make it unlikely the holiday would take place, and for the most part it hasn't entered my thoughts. When it has, I've reminded myself that this pandemic has robbed people of far more important things than a few days away. This week, however, I have to admit it's been on my mind.
A dew days in a strange setting, trying to manage in a different language, tasting the local food and enjoying new activities always gets my rarely used brain cells firing. Inevitably, I return with a notebook full of ideas for characters and plots, features, blogs and tweets. None of that's going to happen this year. I'm not asking for sympathy though. I have all my previous holiday diaries to read through, not only to relive the memories, but to reawaken some of those ideas that I haven't got around to yet.
Most years, a theme emerges. On Rhodes, it was the cats that seem to be in charge everywhere. Barcelona was all about light: the contrast between the old cathedral and Goudi's Sagrada Familia, or the Dancing Fountain of Montjuïc for instance. In Verona, it was most definitely the waiters–who needed cabaret? Venice was all about the things you discover when you get lost–and so on.
Who knows what the overriding influence of Dubrovnik might have been? When the new normal has returned to something more like the old normal, I yet may find out.