Holidays...

I’ve just been on holiday with my girlfriends, I’m not showing off (much) but we really are first rate, exceptional holidaymakers.

I know what you’ll be thinking but you’re wrong, we don’t just enjoy holidaying we’re masters of it. Our getting up times are perfectly synched our boredom thresholds  minutely aligned – to be clear I’m not suggesting we’d be good at everyone’s holidays but at our own, as I said - prize-winners. If there were to be a prize for the most skilled holidaymakers we’d be there. Unless we were on holiday.

We’ve been holidaying together for over 10 years, not every year more’s the pity but as many as we possibly can. This year for the first time we had a list, not of sights to see (a maximum of 3 on any one weeks trip is about all we will ever manage) but of conversation topics. We had been worried, you see , that we might forget something very important. The topics ranged from yoghurt to marital issues via feminism and therapy.

I suppose it could be said that we aren’t the most dynamic of holiday companions. The owner of the very pretty quinta B&B we stayed at this year asked us every morning in the style of a kindly dad “so girls, what are your plans for today” at which we’d mutter back “catching up with each other.....pool.....reading....errrm can we have some more jam please?” We must have been the most inert guests he’d ever hosted. We made of point several times of mentioning that actually we live in different countries don’t you know, nice to get together, not so many opportunities, blah blah as if we lived in a world without mobiles, skype, email or air travel. “Well, let me know if you need a lift to the station” he’d reply indulgently.

Really though, as marvellous as all those things are, nothing beats face to face time. I assume it’s why all those business people still have meetings instead of one massive IM session, that and the free biscuits of course.

It‘s interesting to see which topics have remained the same over the years....would you recognise your own forearm if it happened to be on a conveyor belt with other forearms is pretty constant but as the years progress we now have the issues of marriage, houses, babies, salaries, second careers (I have yet to settle on a first but I have very clever & successful friends) to discuss. This year gender roles were a big issue, especially the power balance in relationships and the rise of dominant females within our peer group....who’d have thought that on our first college trip to Tenerife where the biggest topics were a. who lost the kitty purse and b. who had been sick outside Linekars bar?

So while we may have seemed a trifle lazy (and what of it, we’re on holiday) we actually had a lot of food for thought to get down this year. Well done us.