The Village Has Trebled In Size

They arrive in cars with foreign plates and stay for three weeks. They are generous, loud, sunburnt within a day, and full of comparisons. By the second week the square holds two distinct populations who love each other enormously and can no longer talk about anything except the price of things.

The beach is empty. The loungers are not. Fourteen of them carry a towel, a book placed face down, or in one case a single flip-flop, laid there before seven by people who then went back to bed for four hours and will arrive at eleven expecting their claim to be honoured. It always is. That is the tragedy.