Not meaning to sound all first-world problems here, but does anyone else stagger into a situation in which they’re too exhausted to book a holiday? I’m talking about a lack of bandwidth in which merely summoning the energy to fantasise - let alone arrange the thing - feels like yet another unconquerable chore? A jaunt to Hatchards to select the most PLU guide book? Why, yes, ideally after a China Town lunch. Any further mental engagement whatsoever - absolutely not, no.
I’ve always been bad at taking breaks, even before I was self-employed. In theory, I know that they’re a guarantee of sanity etc. In practice, does one ever really have the time, the funds, but, most importantly, the sheer bloody energy to think, plot, or even merely engage? I can see why people choose to return to the same place time and time again.
And, yet, newness, a degree of challenge is what refreshes my addled brain. Besides, at 53, there’s still rather a lot of the world I’d like to see while still mobile: not travel for travel’s sake, but mind-expanding excursions that quash everyday banalities back into perspective, such that Polly Vernon wrote about in her Grazia column this summer. It’s just that I can’t even, as you will discern from the fact that I’m talking about booking a “summer” hols for October.
A decade in, Terence and I are better at knowing what the other needs (see last year’s Telegraph article on vacation couple compromise, reproduced below). He wants to swim and look at buildings. I crave prehistory to the late Bronze Age, a spot of pre- and/or postmodern art, the odd shop, sleep, and, where possible, sea. Think Boys’ Own Adventure meets peri-menopausal geek-fest, plus local Zara. He is generous in terms of taking on the admin. However, this does lead to more than the occasional bout of sleeping rough (see last year’s Times article on his crime-scene Airbnb selections, reproduced below). Negotiation is all, then, but negotiation is exhausting.
I suppose this is what travel agents were for, back in the day, and what posh packages achieve now. What I need is a service entitled: “Tasteful holiday opps for broke, knackered culture bores, who don’t want to interact with anyone like them”.
This time round, matters may be slightly simpler, thank Zeus. I want to go to Cyprus, the final destination in my obsessive-compulsive, tri-island, prehistory to Bronze Age collapse tour, following on from expeditions to Crete and Sardinia. Anyone au fait with ancient and seriously ancient Cyprus? I’ve purchased Cypria: A Journey to the Heart of the Mediterranean (2024) by Alex Christofi, in the hope that it will be as brilliant as Jeff Biggers’s outstanding In Sardinia: An Unexpected Journey in Italy (2023).
And any thoughts as to where to lay our hats? I’ve been lucky enough to stay at the Anassa in the past for a job, but there is no way on earth that Tezzer will run to this paradise.
And, after Cyprus, can I simply copy what you lot have done vaycay-wise? I have taken a fancy to the idea of Poland at Christmas. Tezzer feels we need to head to Spain. Wherever we end up, I beg you: SEND HELP in the comments section.
Meanwhile, here are my
Tightwad Holiday Tips (that don’t ruin things):
1.Trade brekker for a cocktail
Unless your lodgings are famous for their breakfasts (the Cip’s ruins life thereafter), skip brekker charges for coffee and a bun beyond its walls, gazing at something glorious.
Instead, spend your money on a cocktail, or pot of tea in the grandest hotel in town. Firstly, this will prove a holiday in itself, whether gazing at the beau monde at Paris’s Bristol, watching politicians come and go in Athens’s Hotel Grande Bretagne, or having one’s martini alongside the King, as happened to me once at Seville’s Alfonso XIII.
Plus: salty snacks. Even my Trotskyite northern brother appreciated having the Gritti’s terrace to ourselves one evening, sustained by a crisp- and olive-bearing waiter. While the divine Danieli once brought Terence a magnificent cake on learning that we were celebrating his birthday with a glass overlooking the lagoon.
2.Charm is all
Talk to the locals as if they are human, and all good things will follow. In Venice, a closed, out-of-season, Sunday restaurant became magically open after I sat and read Donna e il Vagabondo with the proprietor’s daughter. I have lost count of the parties, weddings and village feasts I have attended simply by smiling; the theoretically inaccessible museum areas I have beguiled my way into. I have no language skills, but not being a dick is universal.