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The poet, Charles Hasty, had been cajoling me for years to spend some time in Mexico in the hope that he and his wife and myself might be able to create a kind of poets' colony down there. In the summer of 1997, in a cyber cafe in Florence, I discovered the wonder of email and wrote to Charles telling him I was on my way to Santa Cruz and, perhaps, if he still thought it a good idea, I'd come to Mexico.

A number of minor and not-so-minor mishaps (disasters might be the better word) had made me reappraise my options. It'd been my intention to spend twelve months in Tuscany, watching the figs ripen and later the snow falling - getting to know each season intimately while working on my next play; but after breaking three ribs in a motorcycle accident, then waking one morning to find the cistern had run dry and there was no drinkable water, I'd begun to have second thoughts.

For two weeks I carried bottled water in a backpack from the shop in Petroio - a daily journey of ten kilometres and at the height of summer; it was so damn hot I usually ended up drinking two of the four bottles before I got home. I knew what Jean de Florette felt like, and since my Italian was woefully deficient, and no one within miles spoke any English, I felt even more isolated than the would-be flower farmer.

Italy was not turning out to be the sort of place I'd been hoping for, not that I knew exactly what I'd been hoping for, but I knew this wasn't it. I'd taken to talking to myself, which wasn't a worry in itself, except for the fact that the "conversations" had become a little one dimensional. A letter from my old friend, Ed Field, settled the matter once and for all - a letter heavy with symbolism... allusions to Percival and the prodigal son. He reminded me that I had a place to stay in California if I needed it. For weeks I'd been fighting against it, but I was finally beginning to accept the fact that staying wasn't going to prove anything to anybody; and that leaving after so short a time with nothing much accomplished on the play wasn't necessarily a failure, or at least shouldn't be construed as something that reflected badly on my character.

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