I am always surprised that there are not more one-eyed people in Mallorca.

On Sunday, we drove to the east of the island, parked under the shade of a pine tree and made our way down the track to the beach. It wasn’t too busy and in this heat people tend to stay a few hours then depart for a siesta, a lunch, so there’s always more sandy real estate available among the beach umbrellas. 

As the afternoon slid along on a timeline eased by suntan cream and a pint of piña colada from the chiringuito, I noticed that the gentle breeze’s soundtrack was occasionally giving way to proper blasts of wind. I knew then that it would only be a matter of time before a beach novice was left humiliated and facing a potential lawsuit.

And sure enough, just a few metres from us, the first beach umbrella took flight à la Mary Poppins. It somersaulted across the beach with gymnastic grace. Would the spike take out an eyeball, impale an abuela, send a cerveza flying? Not this time: its athletic owner leapt into action with a diving save. I held off from applauding.

This very thing happened to me some years ago but my parasol came dangerously close to widowing a member of a nearby couple. So now we always have a screw on the beach – a big one. You corkscrew the plastic contraption into the sand and then insert the umbrella’s stand, which gets held in place with the aid of a bolt. We got ours from a Chinese store in Palma that has everything from paint to Post-it notes and is marvellously called Wan Ke Long. Very handy.

Anyway, I love the drama of a day at the beach and from behind my sunglasses find myself becoming drawn into the myriad little scenes and stories that play out across la playa. My partner gets a little cross when, halfway through one of his fascinating anecdotes, he realises that I am actually lost in the squabbling of our neighbours.
 
On Sunday, however, I caught sight of something that required his advice. Next to us was a man, Spanish, handsome, in his forties, perched on the edge of his sun lounger reading a book. But little did our man realise that he had suffered a gusset malfunction and that one of his croquetas had made a bid for freedom.

After some cajoling, the other half turned over to take in the scene and agreed that it was unfortunate. “Shall I go and tell him,” I asked, thinking that it was the decent thing to help safeguard this gentleman’s reputation. David suggested that while this might be well-received, it could also come across as a little odd. And as I didn’t know the Spanish word for testicle, the whole interaction would be dependent on me doing an unwise mime and lots of inappropriate pointing. So, I left him – and it – to their own devices.

After all, there were more stories around me that required my full attention. Why, for example, did the muscular tattooed man have a bunny tattooed on his bicep (some childhood pet he never got over?). Would the two men playing a vigorous game of padel on the shoreline hit anyone with their ball? I hoped so. Is selling watermelons on the beach good business?

I had barely turned a page of my book by the time we needed to leave this sandy live telenovela whose cast of characters had kept me entertained all afternoon. A Mediterranean beach truly trumps any streaming service. There’s romance, danger and the ever-present potential of an eye being lost. I will be back for another instalment very soon.

For more of Andrew’s columns, click here.

It’s 07.00 Saturday morning: what are you listening to? Picks from Monocle’s senior correspondent – and resident DJ – of course. He has chosen these 40 tracks to get you up and off your sunlounger. Enjoy. 

‘Night Lover’, Natalia D
J-Pop via Mexico – one of our most fun discoveries this summer. 

‘It’s a Shame’, Aaron Frazer
The softly spoken singer from Baltimore has a voice that we want to hear on unforgettable summer evenings.

‘Segredo’, Zé Ibarra
With his 1970s-inspired sounds, Zé Ibarra’s music harks back to a Brazilian golden age.

‘Carousel’, Cannons
Delicious, dreamy pop from the Los Angeles-based trio.

‘Vanille Fraise’, L’Impératrice
One of our favourite songs from this French band. Any song by L’Impératrice would elevate your summer dinner party.

To lose yourself in the full playlist, click here.

Sunny colour palettes, breezy fabrics and a carefree spirit are the focus of this trio of labels making clothes to pack in your suitcase this season. Here’s one.
 
Cortana, Palma
Cortana’s flagship shop in Palma stands apart from typical fashion boutiques. There are no mannequins in sight. Instead, soft linen trousers and silk crepe dresses hang at varying heights from the ceiling, like paintings in a gallery. “We work hard on every garment, fabric and print so I like to give my pieces a leading role,” says Rosa Esteva, who founded the brand in 2001. “I come from the art world and have been curating exhibitions from a young age. It’s about giving each piece the space that it deserves.”

Esteva, who grew up in Son Servera, a small medieval town in the island’s northeast, recently moved back to Mallorca from Barcelona. Since then, she has doubled down on her commitment to working with local artisans and has taken on projects beyond fashion, investing in the revival of hemp farming on the island.

The Cortana shop is in a restored townhouse, a maze of rooms with whitewashed walls. A narrow corridor leads from cosy nooks to light-filled rooms and a garden shaded by palm trees. It was designed by architecture firm Esteva i Esteva, led by Rosa’s brother, Tomeu, and father, Antoni, known for working on the homes and ateliers of artists such as Miquel Barceló and Joan Miró.
 
Monocle spent the morning at Cortana to learn more and visited two other designers defining warm-weather style. Read about it here.

The summer opera-and-classical music Festival d’Aix-en-Provence comes to a close this weekend (writes Tom Webb). It’s an event that sees operagoing Parisians switch out their oven of a city for the fan-assisted alternative that is the south of France. These aficionados with their little binoculars and boned bodices are easy to spot too – isn’t that the point? Whether snoring in the stalls or gnawing on quiche during the interval, they’re the ones who haven’t dressed for the hot weather.

Less easy to see coming are the local boys of summer, who make tricky bedfellows with the Parisians in Aix this July. It takes a while for your eyes to adjust but after enough pavement watching outside various voyeuristic cafés, a pattern starts to emerge. The young Aixois are all walking wounded – casts on wrists are everywhere to be seen. 
 
The riddle was solved outside the law school of the University of Aix, just a stone’s throw from the birthplace and family home of its most famous former student, Paul Cézanne. While admiring the architecture, a well-heeled Parisian stepped back into the path of a speeding scooter. The moody teen pilot flew wrist-first over the handlebars and onto the cobblestones.

This has taken place all summer and will seemingly continue to do so. So as the curtains come down on Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, let’s acknowledge the event’s most impressive choreography: the nightly dance between overheated operatic obstacles and speeding scooters. The switched-on deserve a standing ovation for making it home unscathed and still buttoned up, while the local scooter users exit stage left in a sling. After all, how agile can one be in a boned bodice?

Enzo is a coming-of-age story that unfolds over the course of an intensely hot summer in the south of France and to the soundtrack of cicadas singing in dry grass (writes Josefina Nagler Gómez). This is the final movie from French director Laurent Cantet, who passed away before its realisation. It fell to friend and long-time collaborator Robin Campillo to fulfil Cantet’s vision. Enzo (Eloy Pohu), a 16-year-old boy from a bourgeois family, has struggled in school and turns to a career in construction. While working on a building site, he becomes enamoured with Vlad, a young Ukrainian man longing for a clean slate and some distance between himself and the war at home. Here, Campillo tells us about the uniqueness of our teenage years, romance compared to love and working on the film alongside Cantet in his final days. Here’s a snippet of the conversation.

Is ‘Enzo’ a love story?
I don’t believe in love, I believe in romance. The movie concerns itself with lots of loves: for self, country, family, love and romance. Vlad and Enzo form a deep love but the romance is unrequited. Vlad is moved by Enzo’s understanding of him as a hero but ultimately their relationship is formed and challenged by the infatuation of the adolescent mind. 
 
To read our whole chat with Campillo, click here.

Heading to Centre Court or tuning in from home? Either way, here are three ace pieces to set you up for the day.