I am looking out to sea. To the right, a series of meandering, rust-coloured dunes. To the left, a stony beach where an elderly couple pick their way carefully along the shore, writes Róisín Ingle
Above, a milky-blue sky still dotted with clouds, residues of a recent storm. The waves in front come home to the rocks with a gentle splash. The sun wavers as though it can't decide whether to go out for a stroll or hide away under a cloudy duvet for the day. And I, not minding which way it goes, sit looking out to sea.
It's strange, this winter-holiday thing. One minute you are in Ireland, freezing under a sleeping-bag-style overcoat, the next you are in the Canaries, thinking 23 degrees is colder than you had expected and maybe it would be sensible to bring your cardigan to the diningroom.
One minute you are grateful for the porridge set in front of you each morning at home, the next you are faint with indecision as you peruse several hundred options at a breakfast buffet. It's the same at dinner time, when, in place of a dessert trolley, is a dessert lorry. My mother brings back a small but perfectly formed eclair. She takes a bite and tells me it's not real cream, which is meant to cheer me up, and it does. Nothing is worse than fake cream. Except, perhaps, fake butter.
It cheered me up because, for health reasons, I am off dairy, white bread, white pasta, yeast and a whole load of other things I haven't room to list here, including eclairs, ice cream, coffee and chocolate. Oh, and alcohol. By the time you read this I won't have had a drink for 22 days, which might not sound a lot to you, but it's a lot to me. The alcohol ban is also for health reasons, and maybe that's why I've found myself sticking to it. But I have another motivation, too.
Rather like the way I suddenly found myself smoking 40 cigarettes a day before I gave them up, three years ago, I started to drink rather a lot of wine. A glass over dinner would turn into four or five or six, and although I didn't say it out loud, mainly because it's embarrassing, a night out wasn't really enjoyable without getting drunk.
I have a friend who doesn't drink. In the past, each time he'd order a Coke I'd do an internal double take, wondering how he could have a good time without a real drink. From my 22-day experience I now have something of an idea.
What you do is make sure the occasion you are attending is one you really want to be at. You make sure there is a very good reason for being there. It could be the entertaining company. Or the good food. Or the romance in the air. Or the transcendent music. Or the astonishing paintings on the wall.
But if you are out and find the only thing that is going to make the occasion bearable is a glass of whatever you're having yourself, then it's obvious this not-drinking thing is going to be a struggle. If you find yourself socialising for no good reason too often, you can be sure that not drinking is not going to work.
It has been a learning experience, a series of seemingly insurmountable hurdles to be crossed. At a dinner party I'm bored and slightly anxious. At a birthday party I munch cocktail sausages. At a free bar I leave early, feeling suddenly ill. The hurdle I thought I'd never get over came when my brother, home briefly from California, brought two bottles of champagne over to the house as a present for me. I insisted they be opened and drunk by everybody, although how I managed to resist their charms myself is a mystery.
My brother was amazed. He said he didn't think he'd ever spent an evening with me when I hadn't had a drink, which wasn't easy to hear. We were supposed to have a sing-song along with the champagne, but I fell asleep on the sofa. I had enjoyed myself without a drop of my favourite drink. I honestly had.
On this winter holiday I am up by seven o'clock every morning, which is not like me at all. I go down to the breakfast table, where the age of the hotel's other residents makes me feel like a sprightly young thing even as I tap, tap, tap the lid of my boiled egg. My mother joins me. Oh no, she says, we'll have to move: somebody is already sitting here. She points at the small pile of pills in the centre of the table, which she thinks indicates another, more senior occupant. I tell her they are my pills, my vitamins, all six of them. She laughs.
I look around at the people in golf shirts, yellow shorts and sensible sandals and feel like a convalescent. I am enjoying this convalescing. I think, as I look out to sea, that I know what it means to wake up and smell the coffee. Even if smelling it is all I am allowed to do.