Staying at home is fine if the sun shines – but that’s a big ‘if’
AT THE TIME, you think it’s a good idea to move to a tourist hot spot, it’ll be a holiday all year round. Of course it will.
The missus collared me early in the spring. Where to for our jollies, she wanted to know. I looked at the bank statement and suggested a fortnight on the patio. She growled but she knew it made sense.
This cheered me no end because, well, holidays really are a pain in the face. First off there’s the hours spent online trying to bag a bargain you can brag to your friends about. This is essential. There’s no point in going away if you can’t, in advance, rub your mates’ noses in it for paying double what you did for inferior accommodation.
The thing is, when you calculate the time you wasted hunting down that bargain and charge it at an appropriate rate, you twig that you would have saved money in the long run signing up immediately for a month in Bermuda alongside Dickie Branson. And flown the whole family first class with Virgin. I’m a moron with money.
So, when you’ve finally found your “once-in-a-lifetime” package deal to some far-flung destination, you’ve got to organise passports, clothes, money, entertainment, the pets being fed, the grandparents being monitored for any signs of dementia, and then notify the people who might need you for anything work-related that you will be out of the country. But available to take calls in an emergency. Like if they want you to do something. Anything really. It’s not so much that you need the money, more that a work-related call might distract you from the dysentery-infested pit you’ve dragged the family to in order to shave a tenner off the equivalent holiday in Lanzarote.
When you take into account all the potential hazards of the family summer holiday abroad, staying at home seems like the obvious choice. We have beaches to beat the band. When the sun shines you wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.
And there it is, the nub. When the sun shines.
Still, disregard the weather. We’re Irish, we’re hardy. We’ll brew a pot of murky tea and walk in the drizzle, swim in the storm. We’ll buy a straw donkey, stick it under the arm, mingle and pretend we’ve travelled for hours to get where we are.
We’ll eat sausage rolls from the local hotel, pack a lunch and go for a bike ride. There’s pony trekking around the corner, pitch and putt up the road. Happy days.
So, we did all that. And now, with the kids back in harness, it feels like July and August never happened. They were swallowed by some summer spirit that entered the house the day school closed and batted us around for nine weeks. There is no clear memory of what went on in that time, except for a vague sense of dissatisfaction that it was wasted.
The rain came last weekend, mist descending like an inverted fish bowl of darkness, mocking us for not taking the opportunity when it was there. To run. Feel real heat. Eat paella. Sing karaoke and listen to big-hair cabaret.
That mocking rain pointed the finger and howled in derision, laughing that instead of dragging the kids through alleys lined with knock-off leather handbags as their sunburn peeled (the kids that is, not the handbags), we stayed put and went to the beach.
Now we have nowhere to go, and no memories to soothe us.
It doesn’t matter if you go on holiday to Guantanamo, what I have learned this summer is that you have to go. We have no differentiation between snaps taken in April and July, they all look the same. Smiling kids, playing with pets and each other. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
Well it’s not. If a large section of those photos showed sulking, freckled faces peering out from shaded eyes on a bus trip to a cave of local interest, that would be good. Even if the bus trip was four hours each way in 100 degree heat, and you had forgotten to pack water.
The kids would have survived their treatment for dehydration in the Third World hospital we would have rushed them to, and we would have a story to tell.
Instead we got nothing. We got nothing but the winter closing in and not even a bottle of sickly pear liquor in the cabinet. Staycation my eye. I’m starting my online hunt now.
The aim is a two-week, all-inclusive five-star package for a family of four costing less than a Mars bar. Will give myself ’til Easter to nail it down. Alternatively, a caravan in Blackpool will suffice.