Questions

The more perceptive amongst you (let’s be honest here, in comparison to me, all  of you) will have realised that I have been away for nearly three weeks now.  This is the first post I have actually settled down to write while I’ve been on holiday (although I’ll be back by now – you know how it works).  You will get something that comes as close to a travelogue as I can muster over the next few days, but for now I’d like really to just take a little look at the general logistics of holiday-making in general.  You see, I have so many questions…

We live alone and so have three bedrooms that, except for when we have visitors, are unoccupied for most of the year.  I find it very difficult to understand why we need to clean-sheet all of the beds before we go away.  Does my wife want to ensure that, should we be burgled in our absence, the felons will have somewhere clean to rest from their toils and a nice fresh pillowcase in which to transport the loot?  I have tried to ask, but the answer, in the form of an extended dismayed stare, is not one that readily translates into manspeak.

I also do not understand why, for weeks before we travel, the cases have to fill with more toiletries and medications than the storeroom at Boots.  By the time we are ready to actually pack, we cannot fit the clothes in and I cannot lift the bloody things.  “We won’t have to carry most of it back,” says my wife, perfectly aware that whilst away I will use the hotel-provided gels and potions, and return with half of what we are taking intact.  Sun cream disappears from bottles, but merely soaks into clothes which, like myself, weigh twice as much for the return journey.  The one great consolation of a beach holiday is the realisation that most people I encounter have bodies at a similar degree of decrepitude to my own…

In a world full of questions, those related most directly to holidays are amongst the most difficult address.  Why, for instance, does my wife, knowing that we get fresh, clean towels every day, insist that I use her wet one to dry myself after a shower as ‘there is no point in getting them both wet’?  I struggle to think of too many other uses for a fresh, dry towel.  And why is a sunbed in exactly the right position until my wife lays on it, when it is in exactly the wrong one: too shaded, too sunny, too close to the pool, too far away from the pool, millimetrically misaligned to the compass?  Why is the SPF of a suncream always the wrong one?  Most puzzling of all, why does my wife object quite so strongly to me cleaning my teeth naked with the bathroom door open?

I suppose that some things about holidays I am destined never to understand…

Why do we never get an answer when we’re knocking at the door
With a thousand million questions about hate and death and war?… Questions – The Moody Blues (Hayward)