I try to write pretty much every day, even when we are on holiday.  I have a little notebook which is full of scribbled scraps which, in my current once-a-week posting regime, will give me posts for weeks to come.  Today is actually the last day of our little autumn jaunt, so if I was to use my scribbled missives chronologically on our return home it would be full-on UK winter by the time this particular little nosegay reached you.  It has just ceased raining here in Turkey, but it remains overcast and windy.  It is none-the-less warm and I am writing on our little sheltered balcony in circumstances (and shorts) that will be a far-off memory come the cold, bleak days of December back home.

I don’t suppose the UK is uniquely placed in this, but I do find it quite strange that a mere couple of hours jack-knifed into an aircraft seat can bring us to a place that seems to be a world away from where we started: a place where the sun shines most of the time, people smile and the postman doesn’t drop your parcel into the water butt if he finds no-one in.  Being such a distance away from home does seem to have the effect of quieting the worry demons for a little while: the house might flood, burn down, get burgled but, as there is absolutely nothing I can do about it from here, there is no point in worrying about it.  My daughters will deal with any immediate fallout and the rest of the shit can wait for my return – because that’s what shit does.  Much like the holiday tan, it will all come out in the wash.

Not that people of my skin-type actually tan.  Even if I’m really assiduous with sun-cream application I will still become a prickly pink vision within minutes and my dermis will litter the bed sheets long before I have had time to regret the ill-advised street food or inform my wife that we cannot leave the hotel room as I require unfettered bathroom access at all times.

We come from a country in which the water is clean, drinkable and, by and large, plentiful.  We are truly blessed (although it doesn’t always feel like it when it’s piddling on your head day after day).  So complacent are we that we even flush our toilets with the very same potable water that we drink and bathe in.  Wherever we travel in the world, we are advised by our elders and betters against drinking the tap water.  I have no idea how much of the bottled water we drink is actually decanted from the self-same taps, and I do not know whether we, as a nation, have a particular problem with water-borne particulates that means that we are unable to drink the same stuff as everybody else, but I obey unquestioningly.  An army, they say, marches on its stomach.  Our nation, it would seem, collapses on its lower intestine.  Steam power and the industrial revolution may have been our gifts to the world, but the greatest reward we gave to ourselves was the flushing toilet.

Of course catering standards are much more universally… well, standard these days.  The expectation is that the food in a decent holiday hotel will almost certainly not be fatal – something that cannot be said of many of our own Saturday night kebab shops.  I am fortunate to have what I believe is described as a robust constitution, but even I have been forced to visit, from time to time, toilets that I would really rather forget – I do not have a robust bladder.  I have been in the company of rats, flies, giant wasps and cockroaches that I would definitely think twice about challenging to an arm-wrestle – although nothing quite as exotic as the funnel web spider my wife encountered in an Australian dunny some years ago – and almost always I have remained conscious that in such circumstances I generally have only two options and the second one involves unpleasantly damp trousers, so I go for the former and get it over with as quickly as a dodgy prostate allows.  These days, although you wouldn’t actually want to eat in them – or, being British, drink the tap water – most public conveniences worldwide are by and large fit for purpose.

Being English I am, of course, very aware that wherever we are in the world the only language I will be expected to speak is my own mother-tongue with the simple addition of a slightly enhanced volume.  I learn ‘Hello’, ‘Goodbye’, ‘Please’, ‘Thank you’ and ‘Do you have a toilet?’ in the language of everywhere we visit and other than that rely on the power of interpretive dance for communication – although the mime for “Two beers please” is somewhat more straightforward than “Are your veggie burgers cooked in the same pig fat as the chicken dippers?”

And time itself passes differently on holiday.  When we settle on our sunbeds in time for my wife to complain that the sun has gone in, I often have to explain that it is now 8pm and we are currently decanting our gear onto the tenth sun lounger of the day.  A day by the pool is one spent in perpetual motion, flitting between locations that are either too shaded or too sunny whilst my wife struggles to come to grips with the notion that the Sun does not loiter in the same part of the sky all day, but keeps deliberately hiding itself behind a palm tree as soon as we have settled down.  My holiday needs are extremely modest: an exercise book, a pen, a book book, a crossword book and my music and I am happy.  My wife’s need to reconfigure the entire nature of our solar system is somewhat more difficult to reconcile.  If I could stop the earth from spinning for her, I would, particularly if I could do it at the time of our holiday ‘Sundowner’, which always descends into getting ready for dinner far too quickly.

Anyway, it will all be behind me by the time you get to read this.  My life will be filled with winter coats, hiccupping central heating boilers and my wife’s desire to fit a door in the space where we have just removed a wall.  Thick duvets, closed curtains and warming stews are not the province of Dr Who, but that’s the problem with travel isn’t it, time just slips away from you…