Maspalomas

When you book the cheapest all-inclusive holiday ever at the very, very last minute you don't really expect luxurious accommodation, fluffy white bath towels and the best upper sets as fellow holiday-makers. And sure enough, we didn't get any of that in Gran Canaria. But we did get sun. And we did get a perfectly acceptable apartment, a nice pool, edible food, lashings of alcohol on tap and the dunes of Maspalomas. So as I lay on a sunbed reading David Foster Wallace's Consider The Lobster, thinking that many of the characters around me sounded a lot like people I had seen in Eastenders (there were even two Frank Butchers) — and feeling not a little superior (mostly because of my reading matter rather than any innate class) — I came upon this passage on vulgarity:

But of course we should keep in mind that vulgar has many dictionary definitions and that only a couple of these have to do with lewdness and bad taste [DFW is writing about the porn industry]. At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility with a comb-over.

So , there you have it — I am proud to have been a vulgar tourist and here is my vulgar slideshow.


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Anywhere's nowhere

"Where would you wish to go?" she asked.
"Anywhere, my dear." I replied.
"Anywhere's nowhere." said Miss Jellyby, stopping perversely.
"Let's go somewhere at any rate." said I.
Charles Dickens, Bleak House

Change of Plan

I wanted to go to the Alpujarras in Andalucia and had saved up A Parrot in the Pepper Tree, the last book in the Chris Stewart series that inspired this hankering. I had even found what looked like a lovely little white house with a pool and managed not to be too dismayed by the fact that all of the houses available for rent in the Alpujarras seemed to belong not to earthy Spaniards but to Brits offering massages and exotic cuisine.

As our departure approached, P. became less and less enthusiastic. "13 hours is a long time to spend in a car with two children. It's Easter week, the roads will be packed. The car's making a funny noise." "Don't be so negative", I said.

But when we looked at the weather forecast, even I had to agree that it was a very long way to drive for rain and mediocre temperatures. So we called the whole thing off and went to the Ile d'Oléron and the Dordogne instead.

And the car broke down on the way there.

Oh, and if you ever want to go to the Ile d'Oléron I have a recommendation for where not to stay.

We're home!

Back from a few days in the Pyrenees and home suddenly seems obscenely and wonderfully luxurious. Oh, the joys of central heating rather than dodgy electric radiators; an electrical system that doesn't cut out every time we plug in an extra appliance plunging an already gloomy house into complete darkness; a bathroom for four people not ten. My reunion with wifi and the Nespresso machine feels downright decadent.
Also, do you know easy it is to organise two children in the morning rather than six children and their skiing gear? And the best bit: after four days with a one-year-old — gorgeous as he was — my own children seem fantastically mature and reasonable.

Now if only we could have that view of the glossy white mountain tops when we open the shutters here.