it’s a jolly holiday

Ms Baroque has just set off for three rather ill-clad days (don’t say I’m not pushing the boat out) to sleep on the floor of my best friend, Ms Rational Self-Determinism, ’s holiday flat in Suffolk. It’s Southwold; she couldn’t afford a house. The other day she rang to say:” “I just want to warn you, this is a small place. The couch is small.” Oh. How small? “Well… you might want to put the sofa cushions on the floor and sort of, construct, a bed… and you’ll need to bring towels.”

So off I trot, with the (mercifully double) blow-up mattress of my kind new work colleague, plus a cunning little pump, which take up the whole half of my suitcase where the shoes would have been. The books are now all along the front, which made said case fall over mightily on the 149 going through Dalston (Lane of Huge Ladies, with Even Huger Shopping Bags; they just stepped round it without a glance at Ms B).

As I was deliberating earlier over the tiny space left for all my bare essentials (laptop charger, mobile charger, iPod charger, camera charger, dashing hero on charger – no, scrap that one) the phone rang: one of the many friends I thought had fallen off the planet, she’d been away so long.

Breathlessly she tells me how she has totally messed up any chance of our idea of meeting for a coffee (she doesn’t know about my suitcase). Last night, home for the first time in over a week, she overflowed the bath, “which of course made all the shelves fall down in the kitchen” – “I suppose really I’m lucky the ceiling didn’t fall in”, she says – “and this morning the bathroom was still soggy. I only wanted a bath…” She’s just come in from ten days in Bristol having quality time with her 80-plus dad. “It’s just like toddlers all over again,” she sighs; “if you don’t get their meal to them at exactly the right time – ! And every time I’d got him happy the kids started playing up. I’m totally exhausted.”

But then she tells me that last night she had the best time! She rode all the way to Ladbroke Grove on the back of someone’s brand-new motorcycle! My kid was playing up; I lost the drift of whose bike it was. But it was so fun!

Now, my friend needs some fun, so I’m very happy. So I go, well, never mind about the coffee, because I’ve got the cleaner here and I’m only just packing and I have to be at Liverpool Street in three hours, and the laundry’s in, and and and. I tell her about the blow-up mattress. “Don’t even talk about it!” she cries in agitation. “Does yours have a hole in it? Mine deflated in the night, every morning it was flat. So I’ve spent ten solid nights on this so-called ‘inflatable sleeping mat’ which I swear has a maximum depth of half an inch at MOST.”

I say, well that would totally do my back in. “It HAS done my back in! My back is wrecked! And I couldn’t sleep because my hips were hurting so much, I spent every night trying to change position, tossing and turning on half an inch of… rubbery air... And my right leg doesn’t even work any more.”

Sorry to say, here I laughed. She goes on, “It was almost impossible getting on and off that motorcycle!”

This reminds me that another friend told me yesterday about her family’s recent camping holiday. Ms B’s memories of waking in a dew-bedecked private field at 6am in remote Vermont are, of course, no preparation for the English Family Campsite Experience. I started rhapsodising about the crickets, the mountain mist rolling around the trees, and the freezing lake just waiting for the pre-coffee Big Splash - and the diner in the next village stocked with stacks of blueberry pancakes… But no! No one in Friend Two’s campsite got any sleep, on account of a certain crying baby that woke up every morning at 5, two tents away… “It’s not even as if it were crying in the next room,” she reports. “There aren’t any walls.”