Croatia, Briefly and Indecently Beautiful.

There’s a particular quality of light on the Adriatic in September that I wasn’t prepared for. Not the hard summer light of August, which beats everything flat, but something lower and more golden that comes in at an angle and makes the limestone glow. I took more photographs in seven days than I have taken in any previous trip, including Brazil, and I was in Brazil for twelve days. I cannot fully explain the impulse. Croatia just made me want to keep recording it before it stopped being real.

Seven days on a yacht. Four couples including us, organised through a contact of Richard’s from his banking world — the sort of group that forms around a shared enthusiasm for a boat holiday rather than a pre-existing friendship, and which, in the best versions of that arrangement, produces exactly the right level of companionship. People you’re genuinely pleased to have a drink with at anchor, without the obligations of a thirty-year friendship. We were lucky. They were good people.

Split

We flew into Split on a Saturday and spent the morning before boarding wandering the old town, which I would recommend to anyone with a camera and a willingness to look upwards. The Diocletian’s Palace is not a museum. It is a living part of the city — the walls contain apartments and restaurants and a cathedral and a jazz bar, and the residents treat it with the particular casualness of people for whom a Roman imperial ruin is simply the neighbourhood. The limestone travertine streets are worn smooth by centuries of feet and catch the morning light in a way that makes very ordinary photographs look like they were planned.

I was there for about an hour before Richard found me on a staircase shooting upwards into a belltower and pointed out, not unkindly, that the boat was boarding.

The Islands

I am going to go through these quickly because there were seven of them over six days and I’d rather give you the truth of each than a comprehensive itinerary.

Bol, on Brač, is the postcard: the Zlatni Rat beach, a tongue of white pebble that curls into water of a blue that doesn’t appear in nature anywhere else I’ve been. I texted Gemma a photograph of it. She replied: “good blue.” High praise.

Milna is a small harbour town on the western tip of Brač that exists at a pace I found difficult to fully process after London. Old men playing cards outside a café. A bakery. One restaurant. The sound of small fishing boats. I sat on the harbour wall with a coffee at seven in the morning while nobody else from the boat was awake yet, and had what was quietly one of the best half-hours of the year.

Vis is the furthest island out, and my favourite of the week. It was a Yugoslav military base until the nineties, closed to tourists for decades, and there’s a quality of reserve to it that hasn’t entirely lifted — the town is quieter than it should be for somewhere this beautiful, the harbour is deep and dramatic, there are vineyards on the hills behind it. The food on Vis was better than anywhere else we ate, by a significant margin. I ordered twice. I’m not sorry.

Stari Grad on Hvar is older than almost anywhere you can reasonably visit — settled in 384 BC by the Greeks, continuously inhabited since, with a cobbled main square that holds its own considerable history without making a performance of it. I find places like this quieting in a way I don’t fully understand. There is something about standing in a space that has been inhabited continuously for twenty-four centuries that puts the rest of your concerns in a useful perspective.

Hvar town itself is split personality: extraordinary old town in daylight, full of narrow lanes and light off the harbour and cats on doorsteps. At sunset the lounger bars on the rocks fill up and the whole thing tips into something more performative. We stayed for the sunset and left before it fully tipped. I have no quarrel with the people who stay; I am simply forty-two and I know what I am.

Two Things That Happened

The first is the cliff jump, which I need to document because Richard’s version of events and my version are going to diverge significantly with time and I want mine on record.

Near Vis there is a swimming spot with a cliff. Objectively ten metres. Subjectively the height of a significant building. I am bad at heights. Properly bad — the kind of bad where I can’t watch other people on cliff edges in films. Some of the people from another boat nearby were jumping it. I watched them for a while. Then I climbed up.

Richard’s version: I hesitated for forty-five seconds and had to be talked into it by strangers. My version: I paused for a considered moment of risk assessment and then jumped decisively. Both versions end the same way: I went deep, came up gasping, swam back to the boat, and was given a high-five by a man I’d never met and will never see again. It was excellent.

The second thing is the cactus, and this one I cannot make sound dignified regardless of framing. On the last evening in Hvar, I stayed on at one of the sunset bars after the others had headed back — there was a photograph I wanted of the light going, which seems entirely reasonable until you have five minutes to the tender pickup and a ten-minute walk to the quay. I ran. The path back involves some cobbles, some bare rock, and — and I want you to know that I learned this the hard way — some ornamental spiny cacti planted as a landscaping feature. I fell into one of the beds. Quite comprehensively.

I made the tender. I was twenty seconds early, actually, which I think demonstrates admirable pace given the circumstances. I spent the following morning on the deck in the September sun, picking spines out of my shin and forearm with a pair of tweezers I borrowed from one of the other couples, who were very kind about it. The shin ones came out cleanly. Several of the forearm ones snapped and required a sterilised needle. Richard, who had witnessed the sprint and the fall and said nothing because he is a wise man, was still saying nothing about it two days later.

Gemma’s response, when I sent her a photograph of my forearm, was: “why.”

I did not have a satisfactory answer.

What It Was, Overall

Seven days on a boat with good people in genuinely extraordinary places, one ill-advised jump, one cactus incident, and more excellent white wine than was strictly necessary. The Adriatic in September is warm enough to swim and cool enough in the evenings to want a jumper and the combination produces exactly the right kind of holiday energy — active enough to feel like you’ve done something, unhurried enough that you actually stop.

The photography was some of the best I’ve done. I’ve put a few of the Split shots up — the limestone staircase, the harbour at Vis at dawn, Gemma’s “good blue” beach. I came home wanting to go back immediately and also wanting to sit at home for three days, which I think is the correct post-holiday emotional signature.

Other News

The PM role is going well. The Chelmsford development is well into construction, which is the part I like best — the point at which plans stop being plans and things start being built. I am also learning, with the patient resignation of someone who should have known this already, that there is a particular species of architect who is magnificent at concept design and somewhat less interested in the technical detail that makes the concept buildable. This is not a design and build contract. I mention this without further comment.

Gemma is in her final year of sixth form and has opinions about everything, as she has always had opinions about everything, now applied to A-level texts as well as to sport and New Zealand and the failings of English weather. The Lions tour in June and July was an education in the full range of her vocabulary. The third test — a draw, a nail-biting draw — produced a Saturday morning assessment of the referee that I won’t reproduce here, delivered at a volume and with a specificity that suggested she’d been saving it up. She went out with friends for the afternoon. I chose to consider the whole episode a statistical anomaly. One does.

The cactus spines are almost all out and autumn is here and I am, on balance, completely fine.