A Search for Donald Cottee is a comic tragedy about individualism. Donald, nicknamed Donkey, is an internet Quixote, bent on doing good works. Donkey Cottee and his wife, Poncho Suzie, have retired to Benidorm on Spain’s Costa Blanca from their Yorkshire mining village. Don has left behind his incessant self-education and Suzie has turned the corner of her illness. Their new life is parked on the La Manca campsite from where they pursue their ambition of eternal holiday. To record the precious experience and make its potential paradise available to all, they blog. But they can never escape their Yorkshire origins. Episodes from the past reappear. Meanwhile, Don’s environmental campaigning and Suzie’s quest for business success fill their time. However, they discover that friends are transacting the businesses of their own lives. There is money in vice, more in property, even more in trading people. In a world where competition is the norm, where a dog’s only possible diet is another dog, Don and Suzie are determined to do good works, be honest and loyal to all, to support what is right. But then, in the final analysis, when the jigsaw of lives is broken apart, it appears that perhaps the pieces never did fit. So finally, still trying to do good, Donkey Cottee and Poncho Suzie leave us with an enigma. Or is it a riddle?
