Mexico notebook

Four a.m. Something was triggering the motion-sensor on the outside light. One minute, darkness, the next, a window-full of flailing palm leaves, bright with rain. I blinked for a bit, then remembered: hurricane! There was one on its way, we’d been told by Rudy, the beach barman the day before, a bruiser called Ernesto. But Rudy had been phlegmatic: Ernesto is category 1, no problem. iPhone said different. By the light of that terrible little rectangle I fed my fear with headlines from round the world: ‘Ernesto gathers strength and takes aim at Tulum.’ ‘Ernesto careens across the Caribbean towards Mexico.’ ‘Ernesto could devastate Yucatan.’ By morning, I was pale with terror; a victim of my own profession. Rudy explained again: the government will evacuate if Ernesto is a problem. Stop worrying! And yet: ‘Takes aim’; ‘hurtles’; ‘devastating force’. I paced the beach. The sky was black; the sea plain weird, flinging sudden waves right up the sand, ignoring the usual rules of incremental tidal creep. It was enough for me. Avoiding Rudy’s eye, I fled, dragging a reluctant Dom with me. And as we drove, quiet with cowardice, we talked about that distant time before iphones when one took the world as one found it.

I had no idea the jungle at night was so loud. First the relentless football rattle of courting frogs, then great whooping whistles, sudden short screams and the thud of insects the size of mice hitting the mesh-walls of our hut. Only the predators are silent. In the morning, we watched a black tarantula feel his way home, gingerly and confident as a cat.

The road out of Villahermosa to Frontera, where Graham Greene found faith, moved by the humbling piety of ordinary mexicans, is marked for the moment (and the foreseeable) by a dead donkey in what a forensic pathologist would call the second stage of decay.