Paradise is ever an island. “A beautiful island,” said my German colleague, Claudia. “Unknown. Unspoilt. Ibiza.”

That was 40 years ago, we were on subsistence wages at a language school in Paris. There was no easy jet to heaven then: angels worked their passage. Claudia was not being altruistic in disclosing paradise on earth — she needed someone to share travelling expenses.

Many days later, I woke in my chair on the deck of the Wednesday boat from Barcelona — the only connection to paradise — and for the first time I opened my eyes on the gingerbread fortress, Dalt Vila, its renaissance walls aglow in a celestial dawn. The ensuing two-week holiday lasted for more than a year.

When my son heard I was going back, he looked alarmed. Ibiza may be going up in the world — the trend is for boutique hotels and stylish bars — but its bread and butter is still drink-fuelled teenagers and meat-market superclubs. No place for old women, then.

But arriving four decades later, on the boat from Barcelona, I watched the port rise out of a midday haze and, for a blissful moment, present beauty perfectly mimicked memory. At the foot of the gangway was a tall Englishman, hair now white, darker in bygone summers when he was regularly seen among the dozen or so others hanging around the jetty on Wednesday mornings, sizing up new talent off the boat. This time he had come to meet one of his oldest friends.

“You are going to hate the traffic,” he told me.

As I recall, it was he who imported the first foreign vehicle to an island that has since become utterly car-dependent. In olden days, the roads were tracks for wagons and beasts of burden (what has become of them?); we sailed dinghies to the beaches, or paid fishermen (what has become of them?) to deliver us as far as Portinatx in the north, and hoped they’d remember to pick us up later.

Under the shadow of sky-scraping ships in port, my old friend chose one of countless eateries and bars and ordered a lunch that cost approximately twice what I’d lived on for a week in the olden days, including a few meals out at Juanito’s, the only quayside restaurant back then. Juanito’s recitation of his unwritten menu always began, “Hay higado...” (“There is liver...”)

Later, at the hotel, struggling to stay awake for the drama of a Spanish sunset, I tried to decide which had more painfully humiliated my memory during my quick once-over of Ibiza town as it now is. Finding McDonald’s there? Or Cartier?

BEACHES DEFINE paradise only for visitors; inhabitants are soon too busy or blasé. Long ago, most of us had only cold water at home; a bigger treat than sunbathing was an occasional hot bath in the one and only local hotel. Access to popular beaches in high season now is jammed by cars all parked facing the sea; turning to head home is a lengthy, challenging manoeuvre.

Foreign residents nowadays prefer private swimming pools, especially in the pine-scented hills where some of them pay through their turned-up noses — £4m was the asking price of one gorgeous shack I visited — to avoid the increasingly noisome coast.

Passenger ferries leave Ibiza port for some beaches and towns, including Santa Eulalia, a sedate retirement community, and the sun-slum of San Antonio — once a charming fishing town, it now seethes all night in season with yobs and yobettes from every European nation and, increasingly, from the USA.

Strolling the Playa d’en Bossa, more or less a family beach, a short boat trip from Ibiza town, sea-music drowned in the ubiquitous groin-thumping beat from bars and food stalls, I imagined myself still resident, employed on one of the new English-language papers created mainly to tout clubs and DJs. I’d be writing an agony column, perhaps, advocating contraceptives, of course, but for heaven’s sake, a more discreet disposal of them afterwards than those bobbing in on the tide around my toes.