Vacances

I never used to get holidays, which is why I'm not very well-travelled. My mother has never liked them. When I was young we used to go to Cornwall on a day-long car trip or, after we had moved near Portsmouth, to France on the overnight ferry. The one attempt that my brother, mother and I made to organise something a little more exotic, a trip to Pompeii, was vetoed by my dad on the grounds that the place is very hot and full of flies. Meanwhile, my dad got to disappear most autumns to obscure parts of middle Asia on plant-hunting expeditions, often in Bhutan. My mother got very bad-tempered while he was gone and I would get upset because I couldn't quite remember what he looked like. Postcards he sent immediately on his arrival in Thimpu wouldn't get to us until months later, and this was before the days of satellite phones, so we didn't hear from him at all while he was gone, and turning up at the airport to collect him on the appointed day was an act of faith. He returned with a weather-beaten tan, immensely smelly laundry, a new species of rhododendron or camelia or such, and the occasional obscure intestinal parasite which meant the whole family had to be dose with remarkably foul-tasting worm powders. He would cheerfully tell us stories of being airlifted from mountain passes by the Indian Army, or thrown into prison by corrupt Nepali policeman, which always sounded to me not just scary but rather hard work. So I never got the idea of travelling for pleasure -- even those straight-forward ferry trips to France started badly as we put Peggy the dog in kennels. She'd had a bad experience with a sexually-voracious labrador and hated to be left. When we returned to collect her my mother would make us sit wait in the car in case she'd died while we were gone, and I knew that was why she did it too, which made those car waits pretty dire. And as an adult organising trips for myself seemed too much like a high-pressure chore; and also to raise the disturbing question, why am I expecting to enjoy a place just because it's a long way away? What precisely am I running away from?

But in the last couple of years I've just begun to understand. I think it's because now I'm older and I know exactly what I'm running away from (the shock is it turned out not to be myself). Today I took a long train journey down to my parents' in Devon to drop off my rats for ratsitting while I'm gone. My father checked and although they are rodents their tame status means it's not illegal for me to transport Yaffle and Muesli onto agricultural premises. (Though my parents currently can't move any of their alpacas under the regulations of the immediate response to the new foot and mouth outbreak, which is tricky when they're running out of grazing.) The journey down here can be very beautiful when it's not too crowded. There's this one spot just by Westbury where there's a big wrinkly hill with a chalk horse cut into the side. People wearing parachutes jump off and catch the thermals rising from the steep side of the hill, circling round and upwards like the buzzards you see everywhere in the West Country now. In continuation the train theme, on Wednesday I will catch a Eurostar down to the south of France. Remembering that at school we spent a good proportion of our French lessons plaguing poor mairies for tourist information on their towns, I requested information from the Avignon tourist board (that being my destination) and now I have tons of leaflets on jazz festivals and whatnot with which to plan my stay. I have fifteen books in my suitcase, plus a small sketchbook, and I think I am all set for a civilised time.