A Few Things That Make Me Smile on Holiday (although not always in a good way)

I enjoy a holiday as much as the next man – unless, of course, the next man is the man that enjoys holidays far more than anybody else, in which case I probably don’t enjoy them quite as much. Holidays are like jewelled rainbows in rain-darkened skies, but they do, similarly, come at a cost e.g. it’s always raining somewhere. My wife is a lover of the ‘sunshine’ holiday and as she a) is a travel agent and b) books the holidays, it is generally the sun we go in search of. We have, on occasions, gone in search of other things: we went for a brilliant and freezing few nights to Lapland in search of the Northern Lights (which we found – only to discover, like everyone else, that they are much more spectacular on film) and we went to Scotland in search of what would possibly become my favourite whisky, but I remember very little of that. We have been to many a sunshine destination only to find that the sun has packed its bag and headed off home and, in our younger days, we have stayed in hotels that must have had to bribe someone in order to obtain the single star they displayed over the door, but I cannot honestly recall a bad holiday. There have been bad bits – hotels that claimed never to have heard of us and rooms with more resident wildlife than the Serengeti – but always outweighed by the good bits.

Now I have to be honest; I was born in the (very) late fifties and holidays then consisted of either perma-damp caravans, prize bingo and fish & chips or holiday camp barracks, prize bingo and roast rabbit. Until I met my wife and we honeymooned in Majorca, ‘abroad’ was very much a foreign country to me. The caravans of my youth were inadequately heated and lit by calor gas, devoid of all electricity, running water and flushing toilets. When I close my eyes I can still smell them and it is entirely possible that only selective memory tells me that they were the location for the very best of days, but they certainly opened my eyes to the fact that holidays, like everything else worth having, are what you make them.

I have a disposition that allows me to find pleasure in almost all of what I do – and despite the fact that holidays are almost always these days framed by my two most hated places, the airport and the airplane, I continue to derive great pleasure from them. I am not going to pretend that I spend my entire vacation grinning like some fat, albino Cheshire Cat, but holidays are always filled with things that bring joy to my heart and, to a lesser extent, a wry smile to tightened lips. I will list them below, purely in the order they occurred to me. Some of them you will recognise, some you may not. I do tend to view life through a lens of ‘Is it just me?’ so I’m not sure if they are a common theme of everyone’s vacation. Perhaps you can tell me…

Airport ‘rows’ between people who, for whatever reason, are temporarily blind to the fact that there are several thousand other people surrounding them.
The ‘farter’ on the airplane.
People walking bare foot across a pebble beach to reach the sea.
Old people who think that they can be sexy whilst dancing to Tina Turner.
Cats that take your seat when you go to the bar and refuse to move when you return.
When I say ‘Yes’ to ‘Do you want ice in your whisky?’
Soup for breakfast.
‘The trouble with the Germans is…’
That the French insist on calling Flip-Flops, ‘Flop-Flips’*
Mid-morning cake with a beer.
Five thousand TV channels, but only the News from Azerbaijan in English.
The face made by people as they first submerge their lower portions into the swimming pool.
‘It’s OK when you get used to it.’
People attempting to put a parasol up in the wind.
Chips with everything.
Cloud watch.
‘A five minute walk to the beach.’
The rare occasions when I am not the palest body around the pool.
Ill-fitting shorts and ill-advised swimming costumes.
‘Where are you from?’
‘England.’
‘Ah, where in England?’
‘Lincoln.’
‘Where?’
‘Lincoln. It’s in Lincolnshire.’
‘Is it near London?’
‘No.’
‘Manchester?’
‘No.’
‘Ah, you’re Scottish…’
‘Does this contain meat?’
‘No, just ham.’
Some people – and I include myself – should never wear a hat.
Dads and daughters, barriers down, actually enjoying each other’s company.
Children in a swimming pool are never cold – even when they’re blue.
Elderly men with holiday pony tails.
Every palm tree sunset looks like the cover of Hotel California.
The sheer impossibility of climbing aboard a lilo on the water.
Clouds – not because they block the sun, but because clouds are bloody brilliant.
Tasselled ponchos and tie-dye T shirts.
The words to English songs when sung by non-English speaking singers.
Remaining on the sunbed ‘just in case’ until driven indoors by hypothermia.
People who preface everything they say by ‘When we were in [insert very glamorous holiday resort] last year…’
Cocktails that contain none of the traditional ingredients.
Foods that do the same.
The series of ‘original works’ distributed throughout the hotel and obviously daubed by an over-Calpol’d three year old with the attention span of a juvenile gnat.
People who decided they didn’t need the mozzie spray.
Local musicians who are clearly much better suited to ‘the day job’.
Couples on their first holiday together.
Men who clearly do not usually wear shorts.
Men who don’t usually ‘dress up for tea’.
The dining room confusion of new arrivals.
Being there.
Mis-spelled tattoos.
Exaggerated sad faces on the return transfer bus.
The drinks trolley slalom to the aircraft toilet
The glum determination of those who are dying for a drink on the plane, but know that they have to drive at the other end.
Planning the next holiday on the way home

*Whilst the Aussies call them ‘thongs’ which we all know are skimpy knickers.

Ah Yes, I Remember It well…

“…The golden hours of life leave no sharp outlines to which the memory can cling: no spoken words remain – nor even little gestures and thoughts; only a deep gratitude that lingers on impervious to time…” ‘The Fortnight in September’ by R.C. Sherriff

It is a weirdly personal thing, memory. Get 5,000 people together at Bethsaida and feed them all with 5 loaves and 2 fishes and each of them will remember the day, but they will remember it in 5,000 different ways. Or perhaps 4,000 different ways with ‘7 loaves and a few little fishes.’ And maybe it wasn’t at Bethsaida after all… It’s absolutely nothing to do with dishonesty, it is simply perception. My memory is alarmingly poor: it often needs poking with a sharp stick before it chugs into action. After a while it develops a startling clarity which is almost always at odds with the recollections of everybody else. Memory sits at the back of the mind and is dragged to the fore through the fog of everything that has happened since and percolated through a filter of received and perceived memory. In short, nobody ever remembers what they think they remember. No two recollections of the same incident ever completely coincide.

I remember little incidents from holidays over the years, but I usually find that I have mis-located them. I struggle to recall buildings, especially hotels, within days of visiting them. Photographs are my index cards: once I have a place logged in my head, then I begin to get access to all manner of recollections. Disjointed and lacking chronology they slowly coalesce into a narrative that is, as far as I am concerned, incontrovertible truth but, to my wife’s mind, a mish-mash of unconnected memories from a dozen assorted venues. I could argue that it is just as likely that it is she who has got it all wrong, but I know that it isn’t. She remembers time, place and incident with unerring accuracy, much as I remember useless rubbish. She, however, can forget a conversation she has had with me, virtually before we have even had it, and what she spent that money on, long before the credit card bill arrives.

It is holidays, particularly holidays abroad that do this to me. Trapped between the horrors of packing/unpacking, travelling, navigating airports and flying, the holiday merely affords the part of my brain assigned to remembering stuff the opportunity to take a couple of weeks off. When I’m home and I look at the photos, the images lodge and become my actual memory and since, like everybody else, I now just take a thousand snaps on my phone that I never look at again, my holiday memory has been rendered practically useless.

To be honest, my recall is eccentric rather than totally dysfunctional: idiosyncratic maybe. I remember all manner of things that, I am first to admit, I have no reason to recollect. “Surely you remember that…” I say to my wife who looks at me with an expression that says “Can you think of a single reason why I should? Especially since you can’t even remember what the dining room was like in the hotel we stayed in three days ago…”

I can’t explain it and, if I’m honest, it does concern me, but for almost everything else my memory is razor sharp… given time. I do have the ability to forget a face, literally within seconds, but I haven’t yet forgotten my daughters’ names (their birthdays, however, are a different matter). If I really concentrate and tell myself that I mustn’t forget something then… no, I’m not going to lie, I forget it anyway. In my imagination I see this little hole in my consciousness spreading through my entire brain. How long will it be before I have to give my wife a name badge?

I do what I can: I exercise my brain every day – although the leash is getting shorter – I write every day and I still look at The Times crossword regularly (and occasionally I solve a clue or two). I don’t even think my memory is deteriorating – it has always been this way – and I do see every day as a school day. I learn something new every day – although, if I’m honest, more often than not it is just how useless I am at something I have never tried before – and, if anyone turns up with a paper bag, I remain confident that I could still think my way out of it.

At least it would seem, for me, that every hour is a golden hour…

‘That dazzling April moon’
‘There was none that night
And the month was June’
‘That’s right, that’s right’
‘It warms my heart to know that you
Remember still the way you do’
‘Ah yes
I remember it well…’ I Remember It Well – Lerner & Loewe

Too Much of A Good Thing

The worst part of going home is always the journey there. Our own journey today is a fairly modest one, but add together the several hours spent kicking our heels between hotel check-out and taxi pick-up, forty five minutes en-taxi, three hours at the airport IF the flight is on time (note that is a big ‘if’) four and a half hours in an airborne Pringles tube, an hour standing around the wrong carousel waiting for a suitcase that is already on its way to Addis Ababa, followed by an hour’s drive once we have managed to find the car (which, as if by magic, never appears to be where we left it) and it all adds up to a proper old pain in the butt. Add in the stress factor – Will the airport be hot and packed, will the flight be delayed, will the taxi driver attempt to kill us all? – and the return journey really has very little to recommend it.

The ultimate destination is, of course, home and getting there means mounds of laundry, shopping and the dreaded return to work. I love my work, but none-the-less, working with the knowledge that ‘Yesterday at this time I was drinking an ice cold beer in a beachfront tavern’ is not always productive. There is no place like home, but there is quite often, somewhere else you would rather be. Whilst it is perfectly possible to get too much of a good thing, it is a whole lot easier to get too much of a bad one. One short snatch of ‘Lady in Red’* is enough to ruin anybody’s day. A short snatch of ‘A Spaceman Came Travelling’ can ruin a whole Christmas. I can honestly say that I don’t think I have ever had too much of being on holiday, but I have very often had a hatful of getting back home again.

So, I’m writing this in the bar, cradling my one small pre-journey beer of the day, popping salted peanuts and wondering how long I would have to stay here until it really did feel like too much of a good thing? Before the call of home became too loud? Perhaps I have an in-built need to decorate that I am not currently aware of. Maybe I have a suppressed need to grapple with the day-to-day logistics of matching net income with gross outgoings. Maybe I have a natural disposition towards self-harm (or D.I.Y and Gardening as most people call it). Maybe a week is just enough. Although, if I’m honest, I would very much like to reserve my decision until I’ve had a second one.

Anyway, there you have it. I will (unlike most of my country it seems) be back to normal next week. I cannot promise that my posts will be any more considered, any more logical or, indeed any more amusing, but – and here’s the big thing – there will only be three of them. I do hope that’s a good thing.

*Chris de bloody Burgh

…And I will, of course, also be able to settle down to read some of your own blogs – I can never have too much of that…

Becoming More Greek

Today is the last full day of the holiday and, whilst I have written every day, I realise that what I have written is in no way an informative travelogue. I doubt very much that you will want to know where I am (Crete actually) or what I have done whilst I have been here (bugger all if truth be told) but none-the-less I feel that there are a few things I can tell you that you might be able to lock away for future reference.

We have been coming to the Greek Islands – more usually smaller examples than this one, but somebody made us an offer we couldn’t refuse – for more than thirty years, and it generally takes us about twenty four hours in the country before we ourselves begin to become more Greek.

The Greek Islands are Beautiful (with a capital ‘B’) but always slightly scruffy – almost unfinished. The Greek people are by nature incredibly friendly and accommodating. Nothing is too much trouble: they will say ‘Yes’ even if they know that they will not be able to deliver. The phrase you will encounter most frequently is ‘Yes, of course. No problem.’ Everything operates in Greek Time. Greek Time passes very slowly. Fifteen minutes in Greek time can seem like two hours – and usually is. In fact if you are told that something will be ready in fifteen minutes, that time is not measured from now, but from some future time of the other persons choosing – and you will never know what that time is. Anyway, what’s spoiling? It will take you (neurotic Anglo-Saxon) a little while to adjust to this, but quite quickly you will come to realise how right they are. Adjust yourself to Greek Time and everything becomes much easier. There is always time for one more beer.

Because it is so hot, the Greek people generally have their main meal much later into the evening. There is no Fast Food here and you will almost certainly not find anybody in a hurry to take your money after you’ve eaten – although they will be very quick to fill up your ouzo. Life is far too short to fret. The world would be a much better place if we all became a little more Greek.

So, you’ve got here and you’ve adjusted your body clock, what else is there that you could possibly need to know? Maybe you should consider the enjoyment there is to be gleaned from a Greek shower. Generally hand held, you may or may not get hot water when you turn it on. Either way, you will not have it by the time you turn it off. It’s good for the skin I think…

…So today is our last day in this beautiful place and what I am most reluctant to accept is how quickly I will become English again on touch-down at the airport. I can feel the angst and neurosis rising in me just thinking about it. I will immediately expect things to be done when promised and in a time scale that I can, at least, understand. I will once again get used to the fact that, by and large, nobody wants to make you happy unless they are paid to do so; that generally people do not smile, that most things are far too much trouble, and I really hope that I can hang on to Greek Time for just that little bit longer, but then I find myself staring at my watch. Doesn’t this taxi driver know I’ve got a plane to catch?

A Brief Examination of the Male Psyche through the Medium of the Public Urinal

I have the vague suspicion that I may have been, to some extent, here before. If certain parts of today’s rambling leaves you with a distinct sense of déjà vu (literal translation ‘Well, that book was a complete waste of money’) I can only apologise and hope that you might, never-the-less find sufficient in the other bits to provide a few minutes of entertainment and (dare I say it?) education.

There is a point, when temporary uncertainty flashes through the male brain, at which the sight of a urinal comes as a great relief: you are in the right room. I am of an age when a wordless icon on a toilet door does not necessarily cut it for me, but unless the world – or its physiology – has changed far more than I imagined, you can relax when you see the little porcelain stall, you don’t get them in a ladies lavatory. The world is, however, changing – gender neutrality is the new black – and in the interests of all concerned, I feel it important that everyone understands the rules…

Let us begin with the typical four stall wall, running from the hinge side of the door – thus hidden when the door is opened – to a corner in the room. When a man faces four empty stalls, he never uses the first one, near the door, as he would feel too vulnerable. Nor does he use the corner one, as he feels too trapped. He will always use stall two or three, and as vulnerability usually trumps entrapment, that will put him at stall three, just away from the corner. Now, the most important of all male toilet rules comes into force: you never stand immediately alongside anybody unless there is no proper alternative. So, the next person into the loo must now use stall number one, nearest to the door. Enter gent number three. He has to stand next to somebody, but he does not have to stand between two, so he goes to the corner. Enter male number four. He has to use stall number two. He cannot just walk out, although he is tempted (the embarrassment factor would be just too high) so he takes his place. This routine never varies. Look straight forward. NEVER speak!

‘So,’ I hear you thinking out loud, ‘you are on holiday, why on Earth are you so occupied with urinals? Is there something you should be telling us?’ Well, no, but here’s the thing, I have just used the toilet at the bar of the hotel for the first time and there, squeezed between the door and the corner, are just two urinals and I am all at sea etiquette-wise because – this is a bar after all – somebody is almost certain to follow me in and I need to know what they are likely to do. The space is small. If I go for stall number one, will the newcomer squeeze past me to get to stall number two? If that is the prospective scenario, then I must go to stall number two myself to prevent such an embarrassing situation arising, but who – other than Jack Horner – heads to the corner out of choice? Bravado is required. I go to the corner and when the next person enters I allow them to believe that the person at stall one has left whilst I was ‘mid-mission’, aware immediately that this will ultimately require me to ‘finish first’ and squeeze my way out past them.

Man number two duly enters, appraises the situation instantly, and prepares to use the only toilet cubicle in the room instead of the urinal, until he realises that it has a frosted glass door. Somehow he feels more exposed behind this than at a urinal and quietly withdraws and waits patiently in the corridor outside.

It is good to know that a certain order remains in all things…

Loves

Two of my deepest held holiday loves, gin & tonic on the twilight balcony and The Times Cryptic Crossword combine to ensure that I spend many hours staring at a half empty grid and a page of clues that make far less sense than they’re meant to. I don’t (yet) resort to the method of an old friend who, when in difficulty, would make up answers – and sometimes words – and if the mood took him, new clues to indicate that his answers were, after all, correct. He took great delight in leaving the newspaper, open at the finished crossword, for all to see. It gave him great delight to think that some poor, beaten soul might turn to his completed grid to help them complete their own, only to discover that the answer to 13 Down was ‘SKRIBLIB’ the clue to which, unlike his/her own copy was ‘Sound made by tongueless frog’.

I love a day on the sunbed, be-booked and all music’d up, and I love the sea, but I do not like a combination of the two. A day on the beach is, for me, as bad as it gets on holiday. (I lie: I once spent a sunbed day next to somebody who played Chris de Burgh all day on a tiny, tinny speaker that actually made my teeth itch. I think I may have tried to drown myself that day.) However, I am one of two, and the other one of two loves a day on the beach, so off to the beach we schlepped. Our beach of the day was a tiny cove, semi-submerged for part of the day (there is a certain frisson to lying on a sunbed as the waves lap ever higher up the legs) and accessed by a five minute scramble across and down a rocky hillside. It was so inaccessible that I was amazed to be charged €8 for the hire of the beds and to be offered a food and drink menu shortly after we decamped. How did they get the drinks down without the ice melting? How did the cream in the doughnut (‘Extra special fresh’) not turn to cheese? How, in God’s name, had a man of my own age got the bloody sunbeds down there in the first place? Had they parachuted them in under the parasols? They didn’t have a toilet though which, at least in part, may well explain the warmness of the sea.

I don’t like sand in ‘stuff’: personal ‘below stairs’ equipment, shoes, teeth and most particularly sun cream. What can be worse than a liberal application of factor 30 over an enormous portion of beach? Skin does not burn, it is sanded off. My wife says that it makes her skin ‘feel alive’. I try to explain that it is only because she has almost entirely removed her dermis, exposing raw, tingling nerves underneath, but to little avail.

She is currently enjoying the last few rays of the dying sun beside the pool whilst I am enjoying the last few watery gin dregs before the ice completely melts and discovering that, today, 13 Down might well just be ‘SQURROX’*.

*Word stolen from the inestimable Mr Milligan.

Walks

We like a nice walk in the holiday morning, she-who-deserves-much-better and me. Just a potter, you understand, shorts and flip-flops rather than boots and rucksacks, but it’s always good to get your ten thousand steps in before the first morning beer. Holiday rules are, of course, somewhat more flexible than domestic regulations, and the first beer of the day normally arrives about two minutes after I notice that somebody else has already got one.

Walks here fall into two categories: uneven and rocky coastal paths that lead, via treacherous coves and cliffs, precisely nowhere, and rocky mountain paths that lead to the same place – only higher up. When we get to the terminal point of the-middle-of-nowhere we turn around and try to remember where we came from. (I mean that in the physical sense, rather than the metaphysical – although ‘What the f*ck are we doing here?’ has crossed my mind from time to time.) I’m not sure what it is about cliff tops that always leads me to the edge, but whatever it is, I wish it wouldn’t quite frankly. The conviction that I just might be the first man to actually fly is not an easy one to shake off. It’s the last thing I would do (quite literally) of course.

On our little treks we have encountered many different types of indigenous flora and fauna (often scaly and mostly with many, or no, legs). I recall with startling clarity having to catch a lady who had a bit of a fainting episode as she tried to alert me to the fact that there was a fist-sized spider crawling up the back of my shirt. Unfortunately her swoon brought her into closer proximity to the meaty arachnid and it was uncertain which one of us (and I include the spider) felt the most uncomfortable at this stage. In the end she swiped the beast away with her handbag and we parted with smiles and waves, but no words, as she did not understand English and I did not understand terrified screaming.

On another occasion a friend managed to collect a Praying Mantis of quite alarming proportions and was most put-out because I couldn’t stop laughing at how much it looked like Jiminy Cricket perched on his shoulder (although it was, in his mind, more the size of Long John Silver’s parrot). He had the last laugh on that occasion though, as later in the holiday my wife and I managed to acquire a cicada under our fridge which started calling for companionship at a volume which, in James Bond films, would have brought down aircraft. Nor did it want to leave. In the end it took offence to a liberal spraying with anti-perspirant and made a dash for the door which, thankfully, was open. I think of him (Her? I always think as noisy things as male.) every time I hear cicadas in the trees – which is probably why we don’t walk in the evenings…

Now and Then

As one of my great reader-friends would say, ‘Here’s the haps’. I have been on holiday for a few days – apologies for lack of comments, likes etc during that time – and I decided to write my blog, as normal, but from the beach. In fact, I wrote six short posts, none of them with any particular point or direction, and each of them took about as long to write as I think they will take to read – and for that I apologise. However, whatever their shortcomings, I have decided to publish them exactly as written over the space of the next six days. I hope you will forgive me…

In keeping with my normal routine, by the time you read this, ‘now’ will be ‘then’ – I almost always allow myself at least a week from writing to publishing which does, on occasion, allow the world to overtake me, but also allows me something of an airbag against the possibility of saying something so crass that it does not belong even in my blog. I do read this stuff, so believe me, I feel your pain. Anyway, in the ‘now’ as I write, I am on holiday and hoping to maintain my bloggy routine from a sunbed with a beer and sunglasses dark enough to ensure that nobody knows what I am really looking at.

It is hot here: the sky is cloudless blue and the sun has forced the world into a protective haze of factor 30, ice and alcohol. While some gamely undertake listless lengths of the now tepid pool, most fill the moments between one bar closing and the next one opening by reading. The only conversation a gentle murmur of weather appraisal: cooler tomorrow apparently, less breeze and, yes, get some peanuts while you’re there if you can.

The bodies around the watery margins are a glorious salmagundi of the human form. Some inordinately proud of such flesh as they can decently expose, strut and flex in the sun whilst others, less certain, cover themselves in loose fitting T-shirts and huddle in the shade of sun umbrellas that require the attentions of at least four weight lifters to erect. It is a strange example of the human psyche that only those who really should never wear a pair of Speedos, do.

It is the same sun that turns some of us a glorious brown and the rest of us salmon red: that means that the more ripped amongst us appear sickeningly fit whilst the rest of us adopt the appearance of peeled beetroot. Being of the beetroot persuasion myself, I generally smear myself in more cream that the average profiterole and, in an attempt to prevent curdling, head for the shade of a bar.

We are approaching the hour when the pool empties and everybody heads for shade and food, leaving a single child in a unicorn inflatable, obliviously spinning round and splashing to their own tune. Life for them is long, but still not a moment to be wasted, whilst those of us with precious little of it left stare at the sky and wonder ‘Why?’ The main problem at times such as this is that inspiration does not lie in the majesty of the infinite, but in the man trying – unsuccessfully as it goes – to clamber aboard a pool-bound inflatable in the very middle of an otherwise empty pool. It lies in the diminutive elderly grandma who has decided to join the muscled youths for a game of volleyball. Possibly local, she clearly speaks a different language than the boys, but they all laugh in the same one. I pause in the hope that she might be better than them all, but she isn’t. She is, none-the-less, fully included: a triumph of human spirit and a restoration of faith, and it cheered me up no end.

Now, if I can just find some inspiration…