Last Days of the Bus Club by Chris Stewart Page A

jury without a president.’
    ‘Er … these sort of juries d-don’t actually have presidents. They don’t work like that. They’re different.’
    ‘Then why,’ I rounded on him, ’did you say you were going to be president?’
    ‘S-sometimes one says things to make things seem a b-bit more interesting than they really are. This was one of those. There is no president.’

    Michael was right about Conil being a long way away. I looked on the Internet and it seemed that by an unimaginably convoluted route it would be four hours and twenty-two minutes from Granada … and Granada is an hour and a half from home! Six hours driving west in the evening, squinting into the lowering sun, hunched over a wheel. I would barely be able to walk by the time we got there.
    Still, the sky was a hazy blue and the northern slopes of the Sierra Nevada were white with thick snow that shone in the afternoon sunlight as I pulled into the bus station of Granada to pick up my friend.
    ‘Ay, Andalucía,’ he exclaimed. ‘What a paradise!’ And it was: out towards Santa Fe the River Genil was rushing full and clear amongst the great groves of whispering poplars that seem like armies laying siege to the city from the west. As we raced along towards Loja and Antequera the land began to roll with hills of asparagus and corn, still green and shot with scarlet seams of poppies.
    ‘Ooh,’ said Michael.
    ‘Aah,’ I concurred.
    A little later, as we spun past the lorries lumbering up the Cuesta Blanca near Salinas, we each gasped anew at the great pinnacles of bare rock that burst from the fertile earth of the valleys of the Montes de Málaga.
    ‘D’you know what that one’s called?’ asked Michael, indicating an extravagantly shaped colossus of rock soaring to the south of the motorway. I didn’t, or I’d forgotten; one or the other. ‘It’s El Peñón de los Enamorados – Lovers’ Cliff – and of course there’s a cock-and-bull story that goes with it, the usual thing of a Moorish princess and a Christian prince whose love was impossible and so they threw themselves in the time-honoured fashion off the cliff and were dashed together on the rocks below. And, predictably enough, in the popular imagination the shape of the rock is that of the princess, lying down, or her h-head, at any rate.’
    We pondered this singular phenomenon together. ‘Can’t you see it?’ said Michael.
    I couldn’t. The rock resembled nothing so much as an amorphous lump of rock. But as we zoomed past, it didindeed begin to change shape … and suddenly I saw it. ‘She has a hooked nose like a beak, and a receding forehead, like a Cro-Magnon hag on a bad day. It seems unlikely your Christian prince would fall for a girl who looked like that.’
    ‘Ah yes, but you’ve missed it. A minute ago, while you were overtaking those lorries, she was perfection itself – the ideal f-feminine physiognomy.’
    For a while we wondered at the transience of beauty, but at our age it wasn’t a subject that we particularly wished to dwell upon.
    ‘Th-there’s a slight p-problem with the judging of the tuna competition,’ began Michael.
    I began to smell a rat. I knew there would be a rat; there always is.
    ‘Go on.’
    ‘Well, you know there are two c-categories: the innovative and the tr-traditional.’
    ‘Yes, you said that. I want to judge the innovative category , and seeing as how I’m not going to be president, then I think I ought to be granted that little whim. I like raw tuna best and I think that it’ll be less likely to have had the living daylights boiled out of it in the innovatory line, no?’
    ‘Y-yes, b-but you can’t,’ said Michael, a little defensively, I thought.
    ‘Why ever not?’
    ‘B-because I shall be j-judging the innovators and you’ll b-be with the traditionals.’
    This seemed manifestly unjust, but I waited for an explanation.
    ‘You see, C-Cuqui is submitting a dish in the traditional and I’ve known Cuqui for a long