The one I like most, and hope to revisit yearly, is beautiful and mysterious. In an ancient little restaurant high on a mountain in a tiny village called Bentacuria, in the middle of the desert island of Fuertaventura, the facilities lead off a charming little courtyard full of plants and flowers. The wooden door of each apartment bears a painted and decorated tile. The men are guarded by a painted group of a fine muster of Corsican brigands in national dress, the women by a similarly glorious group of damsels in similarly decorative and antique costume, with pitchers by a well. These images are delightful, slightly surreal, and not wholly explicit.
Guests hesitate desperately before they brave the sanctuary.
The mysteries and ambiguities of sex are preserved through the very elaboration of the differentiation. This is the old world, not the new. Margaret Drabble is the author of many novels and the editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. She lives in London with her husband, the biographer Michael Holroyd .