My favourite part of a villa holiday is waking up – and watching how everyone else wakes up. I’m an early riser, but I relish solitude in the mornings, so I lie in the crisp white sheets for a couple of hours, enjoying the view with coffee, reading the news and then a glossy magazine (admittedly, often this one). I never draw the curtains shut, so I can wake up with the sun. Watching the way light falls into the room, illuminating corners and then stretching over the bed, feels magnificently luxurious. I bask in it. When it finally hits my eyes, I head downstairs to the poolside.
Generally, my boyfriend has already been there for hours, sunning himself. We book a villa holiday every summer with his family and, by now, I have come to recognise the patterns. His cousins, aunts and uncles wake at dawn and immediately head into the kitchen where one enthusiastic person will volunteer to make masala chai for everyone. It’s a long process when you brew it from scratch, and everyone likes it a little differently (hold the cardamom and double the ginger for me), so whoever makes the tea does it their way and controls the happiness level of the morning ritual. The villa chef dodges multiple pots of boiling tea (and the people hovering to tweak the next round more to their liking – no cloves/more pepper/less milk/“But you never make it this way at home!”) as he cuts platters of fruit. The oranges in Spain are always a hit; in Greece, we couldn’t get enough of strawberries and feta; in Thailand, it’s dragon fruit, mangosteen and rose apples; in Italy, we dipped everything into pistachio paste. The eggs are made to order, usually scrambled with chopped green chillies and then topped with hot sauce someone has brought from India.
The younger lot – cousins, nephews, nieces – wake up closer to noon and prefer coffee. The chef, busy preparing lunch, is interrupted with requests for more eggs. And more chillies. He wonders how we can taste any food at all. But he obliges, because the crowd delights in every egg, every piece of fruit and how fabulous the coffee always is in Europe. At noon, someone will suggest popping Champagne and, after mild and forced refusals, many bottles will be opened. They toast the chef, who agrees to serve a late lunch at 2pm. Everyone sits around the table, chatting, drinking rosé in pyjamas. My boyfriend will take a long work call inside, but we can still hear him, and everyone complains when he returns. Someone’s book falls into the pool. Someone tries to make a reservation for dinner and discovers that they should have done this weeks ago. Someone else can’t find their sunglasses (OK, that’s usually me). Every morning is the same, delightful in its novel routine – and in its comfortable intimacy.
This issue’s Private Life package is full of great ideas for how you can spend quality time in beautiful places with the people you love. Just make sure you email the chef your masala chai recipe.