With the sap slowly rising, I’m starting to think about rejuvenation and the faint beckoning of foreign lands. It is only a tantalising whisper because hey, who am I kidding? W1 is another country to me right now. Having not opened a travel magazine or gratuitously googled a flight for months, I’m beginning to have thoughts. I blame this reawakened flânerie on an excess of French subtitles having blitzed four seasons of Call My Agent in under a week and revelled in its Gallic glory. I don’t want to be in ‘locked down’ suburbia I heckle at the TV. I want to be on the back of Gabriel’s scooter weaving through the Parisian boulevards.
Small wonder I have cabin fever. It took over six months of pandemic for me to venture out on my one and only staycation, or as I like to call it, holidaying in the UK. We chose Norfolk, the Kirstie Allsopp of the outer home counties (smug, jolly sensible boot room, probably drives a Porsche at weekends), in which to celebrate Mamma Flâneuse’s birthday. My solitary holiday goal had been to emerge reborn on Holkham beach like a radiant Gwyneth Paltrow at the end of Twelfth Night, but even that small dream was thwarted. Instead I looked more like a dying duck in a hurricane as Storm Odette battered us all into submission. Even a visit to Cromer pier to buy a stick of rock seemed ill-advised.
Mamma F, delighted as she was by her gifts of rainbow umbrella, Doris Day DVD and three nights in a luxury B&B run by Andy and Steve, flicked through her BBC weather app on the morning of her birthday trilling ‘London, sunshine, Hampshire, sunshine, Cornwall, sunshine…..’. I began a blog entitled ‘Very Wet, Norfolk’, but abandoned it when I realised that having been confined to our room due to the howling gales, I didn’t actually have anything to say. To be fair, we were just thrilled by the change of scene and the opportunity to eat someone else’s food.
Since then my first foray back into the world of armchair travel began recently when I moved my 6th flight in a year. Having realised that – quelle domage – I would most definitely not be revelling in the aforementioned Gallic glory of the Cote d’Azur this Easter, it was now time to face the inevitable facts. I would not be visiting the Musée National Marc Chagall nor would I be nibbling on socca from a swarthy street vendor or channelling Leslie Caron at some charming bistro. For god’s sake, can I not make a plan? Can I not even make a plan to make a plan?
With booking holidays now like a craps game, I rolled the dice and came up with Santorini in early autumn. Why not? Weather still good, kids in school (fingers crossed), fewer seasonal crowds (again, fingers crossed), best track record for containing COVID-19 in Europe and odds for middle agers like me being vaccinated, more than fair. This is how we decide our travel for now, through a series of calculations we hope will get us to our destination.
I first went to Santorini ten years ago and stayed in Oia in a tiny studio apartment built into the cliff that was reached by going down nearly 200 enormous stone steps – a nightmare for luggage and heels. It had no air conditioning, only windows that opened straight out into the sea and one night I watched a total eclipse from my bed because the holiday was that kind of magical. Below me, a Susan Sarandon-like dance professor from Texas was staying with her teenage daughter in one of the stunning troglodyte houses for which the island is famed. I don’t remember their names, but I still recall our conversations vividly (‘It’s not ‘get into shape’, it’s ‘get into condition’, let’s get the terminology right!’ and ‘Darling, the only reason I agreed to live in Texas, was so I could save up enough money NOT to be in Texas’). I remember how we clutched our mojitos when volcanic tremors rippled through the bar one night and how the waiter gave us an insouciant shrug as we looked expectantly across the caldera. All these moments are inextricably woven into that glorious trip.
Holidays are like strings of jewels. They are made up of people we’ve met, food we’ve tasted, art we’ve gazed upon, snatches of songs we’ve heard and sunsets we’ve watched. These are the things we are missing and the things we need to get back to when it is safe. Until I can dive into the Aegean again and hear the applause as the sun sets, I can feast on these memories. Just as well because when I looked in my Santorini notebook, I was too busy being awed to write much.
I will remedy that next time.
