Newspaper column - observations on travelling

This newspaper column first appeared in the Western Morning News and Western Daily Press on August 19, 2023…

The well-known clarion call of a child travelling to a holiday destination is: “Are we there yet?” 

When that child has grown old and passed pension age, the cry is more likely to be along the lines of… “Why the hell am I doing this?”

At least, it is if you’ve had to travel a long way to a busy crowded airport in August before you even start your trip abroad, and your flight is leaving at some unreasonable hour before dawn. 

As I write at three in the morning in a well known London airport, sitting on a chair which has deliberately been designed to offer the least amount of comfort possible, I am very much of the “why am I doing this” persuasion.

The great thing about youth is energy and the great thing about energy is that you feel you can do almost anything. My wife and I used to think nothing of doing crazy trips abroad with two small kids - we were somehow able cope with the mayhem which always ensued. 

Now I am taking this particular excursion on my own in order to join colleagues from the British Guild of Travel Writers to explore a remote and watery part of Denmark. Nice. It will be wonderful. No doubt I’ll enjoy every minute of it - with the exception of the getting there and back bit. 

I don’t know about you, but the older I get the more I like the idea of my own bed. Once you are away and you’ve been shown to your room - complete with king-sized bed, posh Egyptian cotton sheets etc - it’s okay, partly because it does become your own bed for a short period. But in the general scheme of things, the bed at home is the best bed in the world. 

Certainly, a lot better than a hard seat in Stansted.

I feel sorry for my daughter on this account. She would like us to do a bit more in the way of night-time baby-sitting by going to her house and staying over. But I am reluctant to do this, much preferring to return home instead. Or, even better, having our grandson around at ours for the evening or the entire night. 

But he’s not quite old enough yet and she thinks it would disturb his already hit-and-miss sleep pattern. So I end up feeling a bit guilty that I’m not leaping with enthusiasm to stay over at her place. But my parents were just the same. Not once did they ever babysit by spending the night at our abode, even when we lived in a massive manor house where they could have had an entire floor to themselves. It was always a case of taking the kids to them.

This column has often discussed the idea that there seem to be certain time-markers which punctuate a person’s life. The kind of markers which arrive in your personality at a certain age, whether you like it or not. 

I remember writing about how you need to be of a specific age (just over 40, maybe) to become addicted to visiting garden-centres and how, at around that same age, men start sporting the kind of drab wind-cheater jackets they’d never have dreamed of wearing before.  

One minute you’re night-clubbing, looking cool and getting regularly inebriated without a care in the world, the next you’re pushing one of those extra-large trolleys around some retail-centre studying the various forms of heather which you want for a rockery. From hedonism to heather in a few months. From rock-n-roll to a rockery within weeks.

You reach for your spectacles, which you’ve deposited in one of the wind-cheater’s multiple pockets, so you can read about the various forms of alpine bush, and you hear your wife saying something about going to the garden-centre’s tearoom for a “nice coffee” - and the last vestige of youth, which is dying somewhere deep inside you, shrinks one more notch because you know the average age in that tearoom is going to be 93. 

This stuff always makes me think of a track by the band Talking Heads, called Once in a Lifetime… “And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife - and you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’”

Well, how did I? How did I get to be sitting on this plastic chair in airline hell gritting my teeth, thinking not so much “how did I get here?”, but “why did I get here?”

The weird thing about these life-markers is that they don’t hit everyone. My wife, who is older than me, loves leaving our home - she is addicted to leaving our valley - whether it’s a half-hour visit to the shops or a month away on holiday and she has no pull toward any bed in the world, least of all her own.  

So maybe the “love my own bed” is a male thing, because I know quite a few blokes of my age who say the same thing.

But I am the wrong person in the wrong place to be making any of these observations - because, surely, no one actually likes being in an airport before dawn?

Hang on… My flight has just been called. I’m outta here. Maybe life isn’t so bad after all.