"You can always get ideas from ugly souvenirs."

BarcelonaAfter ruling out summers that are competing among the best, cartoonist Flavita Banana chooses 2025. "I'd probably say 2026 next year, that's the fun of it," she explains with a smile. She's as excited as possible about looking back as possible; she's not very nostalgic. She has plans for the coming weeks: short trips, beach or river getaways. She calls it the small life; that's how she likes it: "I'm increasingly able to appreciate when I'm happy in the present moment." She's convinced that this perception has a lot to do with the fact that she hasn't had a drink in a year and a half. If you compare it to past summers, everything looked good in the photos, but if you stop to think about it, things weren't like that when alcohol was involved. "Now I'm more present and future-oriented," she says with satisfaction.

This time of year is when she's busiest, so she wants the days to be less hectic, nothing that breaks excessively from the norm. She prefers to invest in her daily life rather than stray from the everyday, and she says that if someone told her she'd already paid for everything tomorrow to go to Bali, she'd say "no, thank you." It's a summer that's not very ambitious in terms of money or luxury; what she does need is water, whether it's a pool, river, reservoir, pond, or beach. Bathing, swimming, eating seasonal and local food—these are what she wants in her summers.

What changes is that it's warmer and everyone is happier, but she continues working and reads like the rest of the year, of course, choosing what she calls summer books, with more pages and that she doesn't have to think about too much: "I would never read an essay, I spend the year rehearsing, wandering around and analyzing the socioeconomic situation. I want to be taken to other places." It is being read ITEM, a classic by her favorite author, Stephen King. Within the first 100 pages, it's clear why it's her best book. "It has an incredible level of layers; it goes forward, backward, and you can follow along without having to write anything down," she says. Since she started having an alarm clock and her cell phone isn't allowed in the bedroom, she reads until she falls asleep, and her book count has increased to three or four a month.

Although she never stops working, the rest of the year lives in a way that for many people would be a vacation. She only has very little time to sit and draw, although she's always thinking about cartoons. "For me, it's work, but I can do it floating or being in the countryside." She loves strolling along seafront promenades full of ugly shops and looking at ugly souvenirs, "you can always get ideas from there."