One moment you’re registering that you’ve been in the same house for 33 years; next moment you’re selling that house and moving on. Or so it’s seemed to me. It’s different for Teri. She’s been thinking for longer about moving; I was the one who needed persuading. 

  She’s been actively looking for a house in Worthing for about four months. She found one we both really liked (at least we did while nosing round its rooms online), but shortly afterwards we saw that it was under offer. In case it comes up again, we need to have our own house on the market, so we’ve acted quickly. 

  “Estate agents — huh,” I can hear my late mother saying. “With the money some of them boys want out of your house, they should be wearin’ masks.” I’d be able to tell her that in 2021 they are, and so are the viewers they bring round.

  On Thursday, February 11, we spent the day tidying the house and garden in readiness for the agent’s photographer to come and take pictures. The following Thursday, hours after five couples had looked the place over, we had our first offer. Having had no reason for over a year to pack a suitcase, it looks as though we’ll soon be packing up our home.

  Meanwhile, we’re still in a childcare bubble with two of our grandchildren. It was easy in summer: we put up a long table with toys and games under the gazebo in the garden. It’s trickier in winter. Matilda, six, is happy to sit for a while in the kitchen or the living room and write, draw and play Monopoly. Arthur follows her lead, and then gets bored. He’s at an age, though (he turned four in January 2021), that most of his elders have foolishly put behind them; an age when you can instantly transform the domestic indoors into the great outdoors. With one hand on a banister, he hauls himself up a mountain; with a yank upwards of a Minions-patterned duvet, and a roll under his bed, he’s deep in a cave. 

  In winter, having felt that blast in the air between the back of his parents’ car and our front door, he’d be content to keep exploring the radiator-heated tropics. I’m the one who’s itching to get to the park. So I mention the postbox en route, and wonder what’s on top of it now… 

  Coming up to Hallowe’en, a group of local knitters, trying to raise our spirits,  had topped it with three pumpkins. Before Christmas, there was Santa, head down the chimney, chest and legs following. At the start of January, Santa gave way to a scene in which the knitters brought together Antarctic and Arctic: three penguins with scarves round their necks, scanning the skies in front of an igloo.

  “Shall we see what’s there now?”

  “Yes!” says Arthur, racing out to the hall.

  Pre-pandemic, we’d have nipped down a couple of alleys to shorten the walk. We avoid the alleys now, but the postbox (“No — still the igloo!”) is on Thorndon Gardens, anyway, on the long way round to the park. That park is named Auriol, but until lockdown left me time to think about it, I’d never wondered why. I now know it’s named after one Auriol Barker, who, in the 1900s, was a solicitor and a keen horseman. The polo club of which he was a member kept its ponies on what was then farmland and is now the playing fields of the park.

  Arthur usually sticks to the playground, with its swings, slides and roundabout. On the roundabout, he pedals wherever he fancies: “Where Nanny grew up” (in Worthing — and other places); “Where you grew up, Grandad” (Portstewart, Northern Ireland). 

  A couple of days after his birthday, I asked him where he was heading this time. “Shall we ride to Cornwall, and see your Nanny and Grandad down there?”

  “No,” he said. “We can’t do that.” 

  “Why not?”

  Arthur gave me one of his sideways looks. “Because of Coronavirus!”

  On that day, as on our previous few winter visits, we were both well wrapped-up and wearing gloves. In the summer, Arthur had got used to seeing me pull a bottle of sanitiser from my pocket and spray his hands before he went into the playground and as he came out of it. Since the spring of 2020 I’ve got used to taking that bottle with me nearly everywhere, along with a mask, though hand gel has got me into trouble in the past.

* * * 

I was returning from Cartagena in November 2010, after researching a preview of a Hay Festival of literature, and looking forward to writing a piece about Colombia without using the word “drugs”. Handing over my boarding card for a flight to Bogotá (and on to Madrid and London), I heard a call for “Señor Michael James Kerr” to approach the desk. Two policemen were standing there. They wanted me to go with them so they could open my checked-in bag, which had aroused the interest of their sniffer dog.

  I followed them back through the security arch and behind the check-in desks, where they asked me to identify my bag. Then, with the dog pawing all over it, they asked me to open it. As a loop of stiff plastic had been put through the ends of the zips after I had checked it in, they had first to cut the loop off. Then they went through everything, sniffing at clothes, books and toiletries and jabbing a penknife into the soles of my walking boots. (If they let in water next time I wore them, I wondered, would I be able to sue…?)

  I worried that something might have been planted on me. What if my elder daughter, who had borrowed this bag, were less opposed to drug-taking than she has always claimed to be? And she had been to Amsterdam recently… I had visions of a night in a Colombian jail and a visit from a sceptical representative of the Irish embassy.

  Then one of the officers twisted the lid off a bottle of hand gel, took a deep sniff, and said something to his colleague that clearly meant: “It must have been this.” Both of them, who had been very polite, apologised for the inconvenience and one of them escorted me back through security to ensure I didn’t miss my flight.

  A few hours later, waiting in the departure lounge in Bogotá for the flight to Madrid, I heard my name called again. I went forward and was ushered through to join the business-class passengers. But I wasn’t about to be upgraded.

  Having asked me to sit down and gone off with my boarding card, one of the Iberia staff reappeared five minutes later and asked me to follow him towards the plane. Instead of boarding it, however, I was directed to the left of the gangway, where four or five police officers were standing over a man whose case was being searched. In front of that case, and quite a bit grubbier than when I had last seen it, was my bag.

  Again I was asked to open it. Again I pointed to the plastic fastener, which had to be cut off. Again the bag was turned inside out. Books were sniffed, and their pages fanned to see if anything fell out. Among them was Rosario Tijeras, a novel by the Colombian writer Jorge Franco about a young woman who gets mixed up with the drug cartels.

  The officers stuffed everything back in inside and I did my best to tidy it all up. This time they had been brusquer and there was no apology.

  If I’d been less tired, I might have dumped the bottle of hand gel after the cop’s guess that that was what had excited the dog in Cartagena. But I was too rushed and flustered. With hindsight, I’m now wondering why, given the interest they showed in my checked bag, the cops didn’t so much as glance at my hand luggage. Surely, if they had really thought I was a drug smuggler or a shoe-bomber, they would have gone through that, too…

  I’ve been wondering, post Covid, if more people are being held up at security because more passengers are packing hand gel. The one I took to Colombia was Cussons Carex. The label said it killed “99 per cent of bacteria”. Maybe. But I decided that, if sniffer dogs took it for something else, I wouldn’t be packing it again. And I stuck to my other resolve: to keep drugs out of the piece on Cartagena.

* * * 

A private security guard of middle age and ample gut sat on a doorstep thumbing the buttons of his mobile phone. Hardly the most inspiring subject for my camera. But the frame around him was irresistible. The door against which he leant in his sky-blue shirt was an imposing studded structure in matt green. The architrave was of creamy honeycombed stone. Either side were peeling, pitted walls of a glorious ochre. Colombia’s Caribbean port of Cartagena makes a transformative backdrop.

  It was this setting that fuelled the imaginative powers of Gabriel García Márquez. The Nobel Prize winner, who served his apprenticeship as a journalist in the Spanish-colonial city, had returned to it in person and on the page, building a house there, establishing a foundation to school reporters in the skills and ethics of their trade, and, throughout his life, drawing on it for his novels.

  Could there be a better venue for a literary festival? Only if you’re a bibliophile who hates to see a book wilt. Thanks to humidity of around 80 per cent, my copy of García Márquez’s memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, began curling at the corners as soon as I flew in from the cool of Bogotá.

  The locals were in a state of heated anticipation – not over the Hay Festival but over the Señorita Colombia contest. A British journalist who had been living in the city for several years told me that the contest (which had been running since 1934 with the declared aim of “integrating Colombia through the beauty of its women”) was “less of a big deal than it used to be”. What must it have been like before? For days the papers were full of it: the parading through the streets of the girls, the awards for the contestant who cooked best and the one who was most punctual, the what-if-it’s-not-all-right-on-the-night worries of the television producer and, finally, the crowning of Catalina Robayo, of the department of Valle, as Señorita Colombia 2010/2011.

  Except from its city walls – often said to be the best preserved in the Americas – Cartagena offers no grand vistas; it’s a flat place of narrow streets opening into squares that encourage dawdling. When I stopped for lunch on the edge of the leafy Parque de Bolívar, my waiter ran off to photograph a beauty queen in white dress and sash who had appeared with her retinue just behind my chair. Only when she had disappeared through a doorway did I spot that the doorway led into the offices of the National Beauty Contest, and that the pavement on which she had been standing was etched, Hollywood Boulevard-style, with images of previous winners.

  Local journalists got equally carried away. Rain – with brief respites – had been heavy in the city for a week. The day after the señoritas had paraded on their floats, a (female) journalist for El Tiempo reported that the grey skies had done nothing to dampen spirits. She went further: it was as if the euphoria of the people waiting for the contenders “had held off the rain that was about to fall on Cartagena”. Even García Márquez might have drawn the line at that bit of magical realism.

  In his youth he lived there only for a year, between 1948 and 1949, but it was an influential time for his journalism and a fertile one for his fiction. “All of my books have loose threads of Cartagena in them,” he has since said. “And, with time, when I have to call up memories, I always bring back an incident from Cartagena, a place in Cartagena, a character in Cartagena.”

  Over the previous three years, a team of academics had been working to tease out those threads. Seeking to identify the people and places fictionalised in the novels, they had interviewed the writer’s friends and relatives and his biographer, Gerald Martin, and cross-referenced passages in the novels against property records and other documents. Having produced a book, Las rutas de García Márquez (which ranges far beyond Cartagena), they were now working on an audio-guide, intending to have it ready before the festival. While I was in town, I made a tour of some of its highlights with two of the team, Iliana Restrepo Hernández and her husband, Ignacio Vélez-Pareja, both from the local Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar.

  A novel set against the background of an epidemic figured large in our wanderings: Love in the Time of Cholera. The book – filmed beautifully if less than magically by Mike Newell (Four Weddings, Harry Potter) – is an epic tale of unrequited love. Florentino Ariza, rejected as a potential husband by Fermina Daza in favour of Dr Juvenal Urbino, vows to wait as long as necessary until she is free again. This turns out to be 51 years, nine months and four days later, when the doctor — a man renowned for bringing cholera under control — falls to his death trying to catch a parrot in a mango tree. 

  Our first stop was around the corner from my guesthouse in the Centro area of the city: the Parque Fernández de Madrid. This square of dusty trees and green benches is recognisably the place where the young Florentino hangs around hoping for a glimpse of the girl for whom he has fallen as she makes her way between home and school. In the novel, however, García Márquez calls it El Parquecito de los Evangelios, or Little Park of the Evangelists. Why? Iliana suggested an explanation: in the period in which the novel is set, mass at Santo Toribio de Mongrovejo, which looks out on the square, was broadcast over loudspeaker, so it could be heard as plainly in the park as in the church. (A plaque in that church, incidentally, records an incident that owes nothing to the imagination: during a siege in 1741, a cannonball fell among the faithful during mass and missed them all; it is now displayed in a recess in the west wall.)

  Moving on, we took in other sites featured in the book: the grand white house alongside the park (“This,” García Márquez told his brother Jaime, “will be the home of Fermina”); the Colegio de la Presentación, from which Fermina is expelled when caught by the nuns with a love letter; the Teatro Heredia, scene of a poetry competition in which Florentino suffers another setback (and venue for many events in the Hay festival); the arcade where he pens love letters for the illiterate; and the cathedral where, to Florentino’s despair, Fermina marries Juvenal Urbino.

  We stopped, too, at sites central to García Márquez’s own life, including the terracotta-coloured house that he had built in the mid-1990s on a corner plot overlooking his beloved Caribbean Sea. (He was then working on Of Love and Other Demons, a novel set in the time of the Inquisition and inspired by a story he had come across 45 years earlier of a girl who died at 12 but whose hair continued growing, by nearly 70 feet in two centuries. She was buried in what was then the Convent of Santa Clara and is now a luxury hotel – across the road from his new house.)

  If there had been mutterings over the seemliness of such a modern house in this colonial setting, there had been more over its owner’s absences from the property. Towards the end of his life (he died in 2014) García Márquez was spending most of his time in Mexico – where he had raised a family – and some complained that he had forgotten the country that gave him so much. Iliana didn’t agree. “He’s connected with Colombia in all sorts of ways,” she said. “He helped get Cartagena recognised as a World Heritage Site by Unesco, and it was here, not in Mexico, that he set up his foundation [the Ibero-American Foundation for New Journalism].”

  Generous payback, one might think, given that on his first night in the city, having unwittingly broken a curfew, he was banged up in jail, his last cigarette butt seized by a soldier.

  The offices of the foundation are in the Calle San Juan de Dios, a couple of doors down from the former premises of El Universal, where, as the writer records in Living to Tell the Tale, he had his copy red-pencilled by his mentor, Clemente Manuel Zabala, and then scrutinised by a government censor. We were discussing this school of journalistic hard knocks, in that very street, when there was one of those delicious coincidences that this city seems to throw up in abundance. Iliana tapped me on the shoulder. “The father of that man,” she said, jabbing her finger at a passer-by — “he was the censor.”

  Cartagena is that sort of place. On an early-morning walk along its city walls it’s easy to conjure on the horizon a galleon of the Spanish Main. This was a port that shipped out gold and shipped in slaves, and the stratifications of colonial society – as Ignacio pointed out – can still be read in its architecture: the three-storey properties of the slave traders; the smaller homes of public employees; and the simple, one-storey dwellings of blacksmiths, cobblers and other tradesmen.

  If the clip-clop of horses and carriages – retained as a tourist treat – now has to compete with the swish of SUV tyres, other more traditional sounds, such as pregones, or work-songs, have endured, albeit in crisper forms. At almost every plaza, you can hear the vendors’ cries: “Pas-tel-es“; “Pla-tan-i-to“; “Pa-pa-ya“.

  Everywhere, too, as lorries are banned from the city centre, you can see men pushing little carts to and from houses in the process of gentrification – the Del Boys of Cartagena with an eye for scrap that might be profitably sold on to a renovator elsewhere. Thus, I discovered from my British journalist friend, did the original doors from “Fermina’s house” end up in another house – his – in the lowlier district of Getsemaní.

  I saw a lot of “Fermina’s house” during my few days in the city, as I returned to sights I had visited with Iliana and Ignacio to take a few more notes and photographs. Passing again one morning through the Parque Fernández de Madrid, I spotted a pony-tailed young woman, feet tucked under her on one of the benches, scribbling notes of her own. Behind her a sign said: “Aguas de Cartagena da vida a este parque” – “Cartagena Waters give life to this park”. That may be true. But Gabriel García Márquez has given the place immortality.

* * * 

Hand sanitisers have become more powerful since the time of my trip to Colombia. Or, at least, the claims made for them have become more assertive. One I’d got into the habit of carrying in the early days of the pandemic killed “99.9% of bacteria”. The one I carry now “kills at least 99.99% of bacteria and viruses”. They’re in handbags, man-bags and pockets and, I see, have made it into the 2021 “inflation basket” compiled by the Office of National Statistics*. This virtual shopping basket is reviewed every year to ensure it continues to reflect both the changing cost of products and services and the changing tastes and habits of British consumers. Some items are taken out, some dropped in, others remain unchanged. This year’s additions, as well as hand sanitiser, include dumb-bells and smart watches for working out at home, plus “men’s loungewear and women’s sweatshirts”.

* published on March 15, 2021