A friend has lent me The Tent, The Bucket and Me, actress and writer Emma Kennedy’s tales of disastrous childhood summer holidays in the ‘70s, which has had me suppressing laughter during my morning commute for the last week.
As a typical Gen-Xer, it has brought back my own childhood holiday memories, including regularly playing cards while rain lashed on all sides of the family tent in Cornwall and, on a more exotic holiday to France, getting our van strip-searched for drugs at the French border because we all stank of the smoky open fires we’d lit. These were the original mindfulness holidays: dining on tinned foods; surviving sunstroke and/or foot rot; running out of clean, dry clothes…
‘Have you met anyone recently?’ Tom asked, during a Skype call.
‘No, thankfully,’ I replied. The parallels between my current read and my dating life suddenly hit me. I will inevitably meet someone else, but I have a sense of foreboding that the next encounter will be as disastrous as the last. And yet there’s always hope…
So here are my top five parallels between childhood summer holidays and dating as an adult:
- Revisiting somewhere you’ve been before isn’t ever a good idea. The allure is never quite as sparkling as the first time (trying to explain what an avocado is to someone working in Tennis Player’s local small town supermarket a few years after a weekend with Tennis Player in Beiruit is a case in point).
- The preparation, anticipation and sometimes even the departure are often better than the experience of your destination (I’m still recovering from my low-maintenance weekend in Stockholm). I guess American politician Roy M. Goodman’s quote helps when things don’t live up to expectations, ‘Remember that happiness is a way of travel – not a destination.’
- Even when you depart for an adventure to completely unknown lands, you soon recognise the usual potholes along the journey before arriving at all-too-familiar territory (which is why we can all relate to the Five signs he’s not the one blog). You wonder why this has happened again… Yep, travels are for self-discovery.
- Faking it can be quicker, easier and more satisfying. A Mancunian friend recommends St Moriz Professional Tanning Mouse Medium; for other matters, another friend recommends a Lelo.
- Dating and travels both start at the end of our comfort zone. Which is why we’re amused by @GSElevator’s arrogant tweet, ‘A guy came up to me at the gym and asked me what event I was training so hard for. Life, motherfucker.’
