In November 2000 I was visiting my friends Vera and Deidre at their house in Yorkshire, when Vera announced that they planned to retire early and move to the Costa Blanca in Spain the following year. Since the 1970s, they had taken regular holidays there and I was aware that they had recently visited again. What I didn't know was that this trip was actually an ‘inspection visit’ organised by an agent who sold houses to the British market on behalf of property developers in Spain. My friends excitedly told me about their plans, imagining a future life where they would stroll along the beach in the evenings before going out in search of tapas and Rioja. Deirdre was particularly rapturous about having the opportunity to paint again, while Vera had a long list of places of cultural interest that she had always wanted to visit, but never had enough time to on holiday. They talked about the charms of the nearest town, Torrevieja, which they planned to frequent when they moved and they also looked forward to learning Spanish and getting to know ‘the locals’. Listening to my friends talk and hearing about their future plans, I became increasingly enthusiastic, especially when they extended an open invitation to me: I was welcome to visit any time I wanted for as long as I liked. They had already ‘done their research’ and informed me that there were several affordable flights a day from Manchester (where I lived) to Alicante, the nearest airport, and that the journey would take just over two hours.

Vera and Deidre moved to the Costa Blanca in May 2001, and I visited them there for the first time in August of that year. Although their house was a 20-minute walk from the Mediterranean coast, rather than the imagined stroll through pleasant Spanish landscape, the route to the sea was through vast building sites and scrubland. The roads were unfinished, there was no public transport, and the whole area was very much a work in progress, and far from the Spanish paradise they envisaged. On my first visit I took a boat from Torrevieja to Cabo Roig, and was amused to overhear a game being played by a young boy and his father who were counting the cranes along the coast.