E Is for España

Which is where Her Indoors and I are headed in exactly four weeks.

This piece was inspired by a comment yesterday from Andy Robinson a fellow A-Z Blogger co-proprietor of Black Frog Publishing, a small press which specialises in adventure and travel.

My alter-ego, Flatcap, wrote a travel guide, you know. Flatcap’s Guide to UK Holidays. Flatcap is giving it away this weekend. Yes it’s FREE. For the very simple reason that so few people actually want to pay for it. You see, some readers thought it was a serious travel tome, and it isn’t. It is a piss-take of humungous proportions, as is everything Flatcap writes. But there is more than a grain of truth in his acerbic observations. For example, here he is expatiating on the idea of owning your very own holiday home.

The principle behind the suggestion, which always comes from Her Indoors, is simple. When you own your own static or mobile garden shed you can go on as many holidays as you want.

I have a few observations to make.

You cannot go on as many holidays as you want. You can only go on as many holidays as your boss will let you have.

If your death trap is mobile, you will eventually run out of places to visit, and you’ll soon get fed up of Morecambe.

If it is static, you will still get fed up of Morecambe.

Given that Her Indoors usually takes three months to make up her mind where she wants to go, the notion that you can shoot off on ten minutes’ notice is laughable.

These four points should form the basis of your initial rebuttal to the idea of buying your own holiday place.

Have you ever been stuck behind a campervan? Most of the drivers have never been behind the wheel of anything larger than a Nissan Micra, so to him the mobile home is a juggernaut. As a result, I’ve never found one yet capable of travelling faster than 50mph, and that’s only on motorways. On main, trunk roads they can’t get up sufficient head of steam to make 30, and they won’t travel on roads with a lower classification because the drivers don’t believe they can fit into them.

Why are they like this? If you pull along the nearside of one, you’ll find the passenger seat empty, and then you know why. It’s because she’s in the back preparing the Sunday joint, and he’s taking it steady because he doesn’t want to spill the gravy.

It’s for some of the reasons that Flatcap outlines that the missus and I prefer to holiday in Spain as the wife likes to call it. The beer is cheap, the ciggies are cheap, the sun always shines and I don’t speak enough of the language to feel insulted when someone is having a go at me.

Ergo, four weeks today while you lot are busy sheltering from the sweltering rain of England in May, we will be tootling along at 30-something thousand feet heading for Alicante and a week in Benidorm. We’re even staying at the hotel where the TV series is filmed

But I’d better get better service than the Garveys do or there will be hell to pay.