Sanctuary!

It may be a room in your house, a church, or just a place with a view, but we all have one: a sanctuary.

It's the retreat you run to when life becomes too intrusive, too overpowering. It's our place of solitude, where we can think and rejuvenate our batteries. A friend of mine has her sanctuary up on the moors. She has a rock that she sits on to meditate and pray. When her mother died, she sat up there alone for nearly two days, with nothing more than a few meagre rations and her thoughts. She was so engulfed with her thoughts and emotions she lost all sense of time. She was shocked to find that the police had been notified about her as a missing person when she returned home.

When I was younger, my friends and I used to spend a lot of time on a small river not far from where I used to live. The sound of the water gently flowing and the wildlife along its banks calmed me. Trust me, there wasn't much that could calm me when I was young. When my grandfather died I sat by this small section of river for hours by myself, to grieve the only way I knew how, alone. The river has since been diverted and what was once my sanctuary has been filled in and houses and a supermarket built over all my memories.

I have been lucky in life and have had the good fortune to travel and see many beautiful and interesting places. But the place where I have felt the most relaxed and at peace is actually a bar. This bar is in a small village on the Algarve in Portugal. I don't want to name the place or the bar as I want it to remain my sanctuary. This bar has no walls, it is just a wooden bar to sell drinks from, with an awning tied above to keep the glaring mid day sun out of your face. My wife and I have sat here sometimes for a few hours, always late in the afternoon. We usually will have no more than a couple of drinks there, but no-one goes there to get drunk - you go there to chill.

To reach the bar you must walk down a steep narrow road which is flanked by small fishermens' cottages which are tightly packed together like the sardines their owners hope to catch. Old ladies dressed in loud floral patterned dresses stand outside of their houses with improvised barbecues made from small tins with wire baskets on top. This is the way they cook their sardines, as the houses are so small you couldn't cook the fish inside - the smell would impregnate everything. As strangers we are still always greeted with a smile and a wave from these old ladies as they chat away to each other as we pass.

The bar overlooks the sea, which is the Atlantic, an ocean that invites you to dive in then freezes you for doing so! In the sea, young Portuguese men ride surf boards like charioteers going into battle while a few pale-skinned foreign girls look on, in a hope that they will catch the eye of one of these young men, I'm certain they will as I look on with a wry smile. At the bottom of the narrow road is the beach and a set of cobbles, where old fishermen pull out their small boats and mend their nets. These men see each other every day but still they chat to each other like long lost friends. At the height of the afternoon, as the sun teeters in the sky ready to fall and set, people walk up pass the bar with the day's catch. An old couple walk up hand in hand not speaking to each other, they don't need to, they have been together so long they probably communicate by telepathy.

The bar is always silent except for a few mumbled voices, people from all walks of life and from many different countries sit and contemplate life or read that book they have been meaning to read for ages. My beer glass has been stored in a chiller, so small trickles of water run down its sides as it nestles my cold beer against the heat. My wife and I also don't talk, we have no need to, we are comfortable with each other's company and both know this is a place and a time to think, to try make sense of life. Here there are no outstanding bills that need paying, no family crises to sort. Work is a distant memory, no one knows us, there is just us the bar and the world slowly moving about us.

I haven't been to this sanctuary for a few years. The last time we visited it was hard to ignore the relentless growth of tourism encroaching the village like a cancer. The locals may see it as progress, but like all the other small villages around that area that have been eaten by mass tourism, they will find that they will end up being pushed out of the homes where they and their families have lived for generations. Their small, family-run bars will be taken over by British pubs and burger bars, leaving nothing but a soulless theme-park-type Disney village, devoid of ambience.

So now, rather than visit my sanctuary, I keep it here in my head, and when life attacks me I sit and release its calm image that leaves me feeling comforted in a warm duvet of memories of Portugal of the past.