We went to Guatemala to visit David, a friend I hadn’t seen for more than twenty-five years since I lived in Venezuela. We stay with his delightful family, a house full of delightful women. We go to Chichicastenango on market day and witness the strangely pagan firework procession from the church; we take a cruise around Lake Atitlan and stop off in the villages around its shores. We fly to Tikal, climb pyramids and hear about the end of the world. And David takes us up the active volcano of Pacaya where we brave poisonous sulphur clouds and risk being bombarded with tephra bombs that David says land with a splat like red-hot cow pats. But the most amazing part of our trip, something we hadn’t bargained for, is that David reveals he was for over thirty years a spy for MI6 and ‘Our man in Central America’.
