Dear Philippa,

 

We’re going through our annual ritual of considering where to go on holiday. The truth is, we seldom go anywhere and on the rare occasions when we have it has usually been a ghastly mistake. Once we went to Dartmouth for two weeks, that is to say we booked a cottage there. It was a gloomy and uncomfortable house in a dingy street, and impossible to relax in. On the Tuesday of the first week I rang my daughter Helen who asked in a suspicious tone “Where are you?”. We were in the car speeding along the M4 back home to London.

Now Dartmouth is a wonderful place where I stay with my friend Tim who lives in a comfortable house and is a generous host and enthusiastic wine drinker, but he was not around at that time and we felt stranded with little to do. It was made worse by the presence of hundreds of coach loads of people on Saga holidays (it was September), all wearing badges proclaiming “Hi, I’m Madge” or whatever.

 

So we spent the balance of the two weeks hanging about in Notting Hill where we then lived, drinking wine at lunchtime, and doing in London the things that people who live there generally don’t do because they’re either too busy working or rushing off on holidays that I suspect, like me, they don’t enjoy much but don’t admit it because it’s an admission of failure or inadequacy. My usual response in the past when asked on return from holiday if I’d had a good time would be “It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me”, and this often coaxed some shame-faced confessions out of people.

 

Our most expensive mistake was a trip to Italy, to Lake Orta. We flew in, hired a car and drove to our hotel full of an optimism quite unjustified by past experience. We were horrified to find a building straight out of a Hammer House of Horror film, dark cold marble everywhere, and the lake shrouded in fog. The restaurant resembled nothing more than a busy autopsy suite where the silent diners were the corpses and the waiters were the dieners. The following morning, straight back to the airport where the Al Italia reservations clerk trousered the price of two high-end one-way tickets back to England. Never buy a cheap restricted ticket. As my son Edward says, usually to his wife, “Buy cheap, buy twice”. The only part of this holiday I remember with any pleasure is watching the Italian truck drivers at lunch in the (excellent) motorway service areas buckling to with honest enjoyment, each with a carafe of red wine at the elbow. But I paid a lot to witness that.

 

What we do now, bruised and impoverished by past errors as we are, is go away for long weekends. I have particularly enjoyed trips to Dublin to see the “Irish Foleys”, a branch of the family whose welcome is always warm and whose generosity so limitless that I often think I should check into a liver transplant unit immediately on our return. We’re thinking about going there again this year. Or maybe a few days in Bridlington.

 

But why, I wonder, can’t I do sucessfully what others appear to do, and enjoy a week or two away from home; they cannot all be pretending to have had fun. Is it that I live in a place that others pay to visit and can’t bear to be parted from it? Or that I’m a dull homebody, tied to the comforts of home? Or, as my daughter frequently tells me, that I’m a boring old git who doesn’t know how to have a good time? I wish I knew, but then what could I do about it?

 

Best wishes

 

Howard