Undrafted

As you round the corner at the lower end of the high street, hugging the fenced boundary of the school field on your left, the coast road opens up before you. It's a mile of simple, unlit road that runs east/west with one lane in each direction, and it's as straight as an arrow.  This is the back straight of our weekly three-mile run. The pavement we're on is a two-metre wide belt of grey square slabs, set back from the curbside by a three-metre strip of grass that runs the whole mile. Except for the daisies and the occasional dandelion, there are remarkably few weeds. Across the road, over to our right, the pavement sits flush against the curbside, and along its far side is a flat, grassy headland roughly fifty feet wide. Beyond that lies a network of paths that crisscross the steep dunes flanking the beach some fifty feet below. From our vantage point, we can see a thin strip of sea, way off in the distance, poking above the headland before it quickly meets the horizon to...

Roger is in his late fifties. He's young at heart and bounces around with an animated sugar-rush energy.   (Six cups of tea a day, four sugars in each, will do that to you.) He's medium height and looks haggard yet healthy, with tanned,  leathery skin covering his athletic frame. His usual greeting when entering a room is a loud and friendly, "Hello, groovers!" The most striking thing about Roger's appearance is his wavy collar-length bleach-blonde hair, noticeably darker at the root. Only slightly less remarkable are his jewel-like blue eyes that seem to squint and shine with secrets. Below them, he wears a quasi-permanent crooked, toothy grin. At least one of those teeth has cracked completely in half and been  superglued back in place by his own fair hand. His wardrobe, like his record collection, is entirely from the seventies. All natural fabrics (as long as you consider velvet to be natural); he's never worn a piece of sportswear in his life (unless...

It was around midday when we found Miguel. He was slouching on the steps beneath a human-sized stone cross on the edge of town. Slim, with tanned, leathery skin, thin lips, and dark, lank hair falling on his shoulders from beneath his leather cowboy hat, he looked every inch the Western outlaw. We knew right away he was our man. We became engaged in conversation almost immediately. I say we—I left the talking to my travelling companion, Senor Tony, as his Spanish was far more fluent than mine. Within a couple of minutes, Miguel presented us with a small block of hashish. I could tell right away it was good stuff; dark and oily—the best we'd had all trip. This was Ronda, the final stop on our tour of Andalusia. And this had been our customary approach in every town along the way— walk the streets until we found someone who looked like a good bet, then ask to score a smoke. First in Seville, then Cordoba and Granada, and now in this little southern town. Our method had a 100% su...