Rather Late Mid-Month Musings: November - IT BROADENS THE MIND!

HOW TO BE A CURSED TRAVELLER

When I was a teenager, my best friend, B, and I used to fantasise about travelling the world. We're both now 60 and she's fulfilled that particular dream. In addition to visiting many places in Europe, she's travelled as far afield as the USA, Russia, Japan and Peru. 

The furthest I've ever been is Madrid...

When we were younger, my husband and I couldn’t afford to travel much. During eleven years living in London, we had four weekends abroad [Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels and Madrid]. I also went on a couple of day trips to Boulogne with the Business Admin students at the college where I worked. Since we moved back to Yorkshire, we've been on a three-day coach trip to Giverny for my fortieth birthday during which we visited Paris, Fontainebleau and Versailles. I've also been to two Christmas Markets with my sister – one in Cologne, which was great, and one in Ostend, which was terrible.

Our passports have run out twice without being used.

We now have a bit more money, but P, an only child, no longer feels he can leave his elderly, frail mother on her own while he nips off abroad. Given that her smoke alarm went haywire during our two-day break in Cheshire in the summer, and her cistern flooded when we were spending two days in Alnwick last month, I think he has a point. 

The smoke-alarm incident did result in his mum opening the door to three burly firemen on the morning of her birthday, some weeks later, which would have thrilled many women I know [and some men], though it just irritated P's mum. They had come to fix a new alarm. I'm not sure why it took three of them to fix one alarm, though I'm assured this is how the fire service operates and that there are sound reasons for it. Maybe one fixes it while the other two pose beside the fire engine so the neighbours can take selfies with them.

Yes, they arrived in a fire-engine, which embarrassed P's mum as she thought her neighbours would think her house was on fire, just a few days after it had been flooded by water from the overflowing cistern. I think she was imagining a headline in the local paper saying

Tragic pensioner nicknamed 'Bad Luck Badger' after house flooded then destroyed by fire in same week 

However, I suspect that the fire service don't knock politely on the front doors of houses that are actually on fire.

P's mum didn't enjoy her birthday because it resulted in a stream of neighbours knocking on her door all morning, bringing cards and gifts, which is always horrible, isn't it? And she had to come to our house in the afternoon for a birthday tea, and no one wants to do that.  As she pointed out repeatedly, looking as if she was being seriously harrassed:  'I've got so many bunches of flowers, Susan, the porch is full and I don't know what to do with them all!'. [You might be wondering why she calls me Susan, but it's simply because she muddles me up with her neighbour, Susan; I'm used to it - my friend B's mum called me Lucille for years]. One relative, whom she hasn't spoken to in years, visited her with a present and card, and, as she told us in a tone of outrage, he 'stayed about an hour'. People can be so inconsiderate...

  

P's mum's 90th Birthday Cake made by 'Lindsay across the road' - fruit cake decorated like a teacup filled with roses with two iced biscuits on a yellow table cloth [photographs by me] [Her response: 'What am I going to do with a cake?']

Needless to say, she was unimpressed by the home-made card I lovingly crafted for her. I don't know why I bother. No one likes my home-made cards, but I keep on making them in a battle of wills. I'll wear the buggers down eventually.

Another reason I'm reluctant to travel these days is that I'm also no longer as fond of the actual travelling part as I used to be – all that faffing about at airports really puts me off. Apparently they have moving walkways and you have to put your shampoo in a transparent plastic bag – Oh, brave new world!

If only Star Trek's Transporter beam were real - though there'd still be excruciating waits at passport control.

I'm now thinking about how cool the world would be if they installed moving walkways and escalators on all our streets. Imagine the fun you'd have watching uncoordinated people leaping on and off, or whizzing round corners clutching their shopping! Late-night fights outside popular pubs would take on a whole new interest as fighters tried to beat the bejesus out of each other while being carried along a conveyor belt. You could have different speed lanes like on motorways, so that couples who weren't paying attention would gradually move apart from each other while new partners moved alongside, like one of those country dances we used to do at school. But I digress... 

One of the main reasons we haven't been abroad recently, however, is the fact that we are Cursed Travellers. I don't really believe in bad luck, curses, hexes, or the supernatural in general, but I must admit that there have been times when P and I have both seriously wondered whether we unwittingly upset a witch [or at the very least a minor rain god] at some point in our past lives. Like the time we went to Cornwall and were stalked for a week by a thick fog. In fact, we've never actually seen Cornwall in the sunshine despite going there more than half a dozen times. I'm told it's quite pretty, but I wouldn't know. 

Because I'm a Cursed Traveller. 

Take our recent two-day mini-break in York, for instance. Back in January, my sister and bro-in-law invited us to spend two nights in what a colleague in the south once termed 'the Tunbridge Wells of the north', with them, so we could look round the famous Christmas Market. It seemed like a good idea at the time. 

And actually it's much more like Canterbury than Tunbridge Wells.

As we set off, the weather was dry, bright and sharp, perfect for a Christmassy visit, so it seemed that all might be well on this occasion. As I said to P on the drive up the M1, 'Sis and Bro-in-law aren't cursed like us, so hopefully we'll be able to take advantage of their good fortune'.

But sadly it was not to be. On the first day, we arrived late and so couldn't get into the hotel car park. Sis and Bro-in-law got there in good time and got a space. They were having an expensive lunch with several gin and tonics in Fenwicks by the time we arrived. The overflow car-park was a section of a nearby retail park's car-park and had to be paid for by using a QR code on your phone. I tried using my phone's QR reader but got through to something that was possibly a scam - after trying to make it work for over thirty minutes, P did it on his phone in about five minutes.* 

By this time, we were too late to get to the Yorvik Centre for the session we'd booked, so Sis and Bro-in-law went there without us while we had a late lunch in a grotty Starbucks in the retail park before carrying our luggage to the hotel to check-in. It turned out that our Yorvik Centre tickets are valid for a year, though, so we can go there in the future maybe. I mean, who doesn't like a very slow ride through the sights, sounds and smells of a Viking city? 

It also turned out that my recent fibromyalgia flare-up hadn't actually ended, after all [it only ends when the fat lady stops groaning as she walks], as it took me about ten minutes to walk the hundred yards to the hotel carrying a couple of fairly light bags, and I felt liked I'd climbed The Matterhorn.

That evening, Sis had a bad migraine [too many g and ts in Fenwicks] and ended up sleeping it off while we went out with Bro-in-law to look round the Christmas Market and get some food. The market was very pretty with its lights twinkling but I think the waitress in a teashop we visited next day had it right when she described it as 'the robbin' market'. It was a tad over-priced. I made the mistake of drinking a large cup of mulled wine with spiced rum in it which led to my spending £38 on a small box of miniature flavoured gins which seemed outrageous the next day when I'd sobered up. I also forgot to go back and buy a scarf and some chocolate-flavoured rum I'd seen earlier, which is probably just as well as we don't want to remortgage our house at the moment. We had a meal in a pub, and got Sis a ready-made salmon salad from the Coop for her tea. Well, if she insists on having a migraine, all she can expect is a Coop ready-meal.

Later, we cuddled up in bed [P and I, not Sis and I] to watch TV but, two minutes after we switched it on, the TV froze - we tried to remove the batteries from the remote but they were screwed in, and we searched the actual TV itself to find a manual on-off switch but there was nothing that worked. We couldn't turn the screen or the sound off, so all we could see was the TV guide with flashes of the film The Life And Times Of Colonel Blimp visible round the edges. I knew we'd never be able to sleep with the sound of  Roger Livesey and Deborah Kerr, who play Blimp and his wife in this superb Powell and Pressburger epic. playing in the background. So Philip pulled on his clothes and went to reception where he was told it was a problem that had come to their attention soon after the hotel opened three months ago and we just needed to reset the connection in the fuse box. Obviously the hotel feels that resolving this issue is something that's not an  urgent task - they did seem quite under-staffed. We ate in the hotel's restaurant the following night and I saw a child who looked around 13 wearing the staff uniform and waiting on tables.

The bed was comfy but rather high, and I was in a lot of pain, remember. Every time I had to get up to go to the loo during the night, I forgot how high the bed was and sort of fell out, accompanied by a series of groans and sighs, waking P who made a kind of disgruntled moo each time before mumbling 'Are you all right?', turning over and getting back to a serious bout of snoring. The room was pitch black with the curtains shut, and I kept banging my toes on the bed's legs or the door jam. Once, I caught my hip on a metal bottle-opener screwed to the edge of the wooden desk, presumably for those visitors who wished to drink themselves into oblivion as they couldn't turn the bleedin' telly off and they were desperate. 

I'd then open the bathroom door and be blinded by the excruciatingly bright light, then startled by the hideous eldritch woman standing behind the toilet, her hair wildly tangled and her eyes squinting angrily without her specs [until I realised it was simply my reflection in the huge mirror]. I imagine all the hotel rooms contained groaning, injured, sleep-deprived middle-aged holidaymakers constantly stumbling round their rooms in the dark like Peter Sellars in The Pink Panther films.

Both nights I woke at around five o'clock and read my kindle for an hour before falling back asleep and then failing to wake up, refreshed and alert, at a more reasonable time when the alarm went off - by 'alarm' I mean Philip shaking me and shouting in my face 'It's time for breakfast!'.

Breakfast was actually quite good fun, despite the law that insists that one of the two toasters in every budget hotel MUST be out of action at any given time, and the other one must be turned to the lowest setting every time a staff member walks past it. You know it's a proper budget hotel if your toast is still white after being through the mind-bogglingly slow machine three times. The food wasn't bad at all though we did try to save money on lunch  by stuffing ourselves with as much of the 'limitless'  full English as we could manage in the hotel before we set out for the day of site-seeing. That's why it's always easier to mug a tourist in the morning, while they're still recovering from sausage overload.

The first evening we went to the market, I hobbled back to the hotel like a malfunctioning robot because I had a dreadful pain in my right hip. It was as if a rope of agony was stretching from mid-buttock to my appendix and sending searing pains down my leg with every step. You'll be relieved to know that by the next morning my right hip felt completely pain-free. The agonising rope had moved to my left hip instead, presumably ro investigate what damage it could do there. This resulted in my taking lots of painkillers which made me dopy and sleepy [please, no Seven Dwarfs jokes...], and also resulted in my adopting a ridiculous walk which involved swinging my bad leg to minimise the pain. I resembled a very short and fat John Cleese practising for The Ministry Of Silly Walks as I shambled and hobbled up the cobbles of The Shambles. Try saying that after two mulled wines with extra spiced rum.  It's a good job we decided not to walk round the city walls as I'd probably have fallen off.

York City Walls [photo taken from car just as we arrived]

We visited the Minster which I have visited many times before and every time I am astounded by how much it costs. It is now £18. 'We rely on your entry fees and donations to keep this building standing,' the tour guide told us, and part of my brain couldn't help thinking that true Christians should spend that money on feeding the starving and providing shelter for the homeless, and let the building take it's chances. It is clearly a thing of beauty and historic significance, however. I am particularly fascinated by the hundreds of tiny individually-sculpted faces carved into the walls of The Chapter House. Many are human, some pleasant-looking, some not - many are animals or supernatural creatures, or representations of the Green Man. Some are monstrous and gargoyle-ish.

Gargorle fridge magnet from gift shop

By the time the tour had finished, Sis and I were churched-out so we went for a cuppa and a slab of cake while P and Bro-in-law visited the Cathedral Museum. I had a piece of what the waitress insisted was Battenberg cake, on the grounds presumably that it had a layer of pink sponge. However, it was circular, three layers high, the layers glued together with buttercream [or Satan's Cement as I call it] - no marzipan, no apricot jam, not a hint of almond flavour, and stale from having stood uncovered all day. This sort of disappointment might seem trivial to people who don't spend most of their life trying to lose weight and therefore look forward with excessive zeal to the occasional cakey treat. It might seem even more mystifying to those weirdoes who don't like cake much and claim to be indifferent to all desserts. But to two overweight middle-aged Yorkshire women on a mini-break and a budget, it was heartbreaking. 

York Minster

Sis bought a hat that really suited her. I tried it on, back at the hotel, and thought it really suited me too. And suddenly I wanted one for myself. Desperately. I haven't had such an intense desire for something for myself in years - it felt like being a kid again. P suggested that we might have time to go back to the market next day and buy one of these hats before we went home, BUT then Storm Bert hit and the next morning the sky was the colour of pewter and the rain was falling in a solid sheet. Not to mention that the traffic was horrendous, we found out the market didn't open until midday, and, half an hour after Sis and Bro-in-law left the hotel, we discovered our car had a flat battery. When the Green Flag mechanic finally arrived around two-and-a-half hours later, he said the flat battery was probably caused by P having to move the car the short distance from the retail park to the hotel car-park the morning after we arrived and then the fact that it had snowed overnight and the car had got very cold. During our two-and-a-half hour wait, we couldn't visit the Christmas Market because Green Flag Man kept texting us that he'd be arriving in half an hour or twenty minutes.

So I didn't get my hat.

   

Me in 'The Hat' which I still think looks cool, even though I looklike I drive a steam train for a living.

Green Flag Man finally arrived, sorted the car and we drove home. Sis and Bro-in-law were at home, unpacked and drinking a cup of tea by twelve o'clock. Due to heavy traffic queues between York and the McArthur Glen Shopping Centre on the A64, we finally got home around four.

* I often have problems with technology. Last night I went to the theatre with my friends B and T, and the tickets were on my phone. I had got it to the correct screen and thought all was going smoothly but the little aged bloke who tried to scan my phone said the screen was too dark. I have no idea why it was too dark as I hadn't darkened it, nor did I have any idea how to brighten it. T knew how but didn't have her correct glasses on, but she did manage to do it eventually. I was in a lot of pain at the time and this rigmarole wasn't helping my mood, and I found myself snapping at the attendant: 'We're coming in whether it works or not!' . Later, I felt bad about this momentary nastiness and mentioned this to B whose response was 'You could have taken him, Louise - he was only little!'. So now I can't think of Sheffield or the show we saw [Defying Gravity: West End Women - it was very good] without picturing myself drop-kicking an innocent little old man down the steps of the City Hall. 

This is what technology does to people...

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