My house stands on its own in a secluded valley curving upward towards a range of hills where rivers rush through rocky gorges. Below it are terraces planted with wheat and rye, oranges and olives, beans and maize. At the bottom of the valley lies a cluster of granite-built houses around a pepper-pot church: the small Spanish village that for 23 years has been my stamping ground.
Most attempts to escape from the pressures of modern urban life are once-in-a-lifetime events. I have made the move in two phases, like a driver changing gear from fourth to third, and from third to a crawling second. The first downward shift was in 1989, when I quit my job, climbed into my little brown Mini and drove all the way from London to Ibiza. The Balearic island was an eccentric Mediterranean enclave back then, and for 10 years I lived with my Spanish lover in a whitewashed farmhouse, for which we paid a nominal rent, in the far north of the island. We grew vegetables, kept chickens for eggs and made a cool fresh cheese with the milk of a half-dozen goats.
As an introduction to the Good Life, it wasn’t bad — but for me it didn’t go far enough. By the millennium, Ibiza was shaping up to be a Spanish Saint-Tropez. I wanted my back-to-the-land fantasy to unfold in a place more genuinely rural, and with wider horizons, than this bonkers holiday island. Clearly it was time to move on. But where would we go?