Summer holiday season

 Summer holiday season.

The subject of summer holidays always takes you back to last year when my wife, yours truly and our daughter bravely descended on the Greek islands against all the most well informed advice. It was a Greek odyssey like no other, a journey into the unknown and a voyage of discovery that ended up in a damp squib. We were told that the consideration of any holiday abroad was distinctly inadvisable. In fact our travel agency and holiday company TUI  just left us with the painful memory of that infuriating piece of music on their phoneline as a legacy of our heroic efforts to board a plane. 

To put it at its simplest the global coronavirus was still spreading its toxic influence across the globe and nobody was going anywhere let alone Greece. So against all advice we did indeed go and found it to be one of the most bizarre holidays in the sun you could possibly have imagined. We were on our own and there was, quite literally, nobody in the hotel to talk to and the only human contact was the manager at the reception desk and a poor lady who looked as though she hadn't a clue what to do with herself so devoid of the human race had the hotel become. 

So she paced around the bar outside the hotel, twiddled her thumbs for the best part of eight or nine hours and pretended that everything was fine in her world. But she was quite clearly unhappy. That much was patently obvious and apparent. There was nobody to serve exotic cocktails or drinks throughout the day and only her good self to serve my wife, yours truly and our daughter. Breakfast would prove the only part of the day when she would have been gainfully employed. This should have been the best time for the holiday industry but Covid 19 disrupted everybody's plans.

In any other year the hotel poolside would have been heaving with vast numbers of sun loungers, families and children laughing and chucking themselves uninhibitedly into the swimming pool without a care in the world. But although we were at the beginning of the holiday season there was still an air of desolation and painful abandonment. This time the sun loungers were out on their own with nobody to occupy them. Eventually we were joined by a jolly lady from Spain and a couple from Burnley but the holiday had become something that almost happened but didn't. Of course we had a great time but the need for improvisation had become a vital one. 

Now though we've all been given permission to get on a plane, sample the unique airport experience that requires so much stamina and energy that by the time you take off, you feel as though you've just completed a gruelling marathon around hot cities. Once the perfume and drinks shops have been negotiated you find yourself marooned in a complex maze of officialdom. There's the almost bewildering ordeal of checking in while your suitcases are assessed.

That's followed by customs, the agonising passport obstacle where everything has been reduced to computer swiping and much frustration. And then the hellish security check while trouser belts, socks, keys, money and your blood group are carefully monitored. We may just as well be stripped naked and exposed to every other holiday maker in the immediate environment. This is not an image any of us would care to preserve in our minds.

For some of us this is a truly degrading experience where every traveller that passes through the airport is more or less considered to be a nasty, nefarious criminal who's stolen millions from banks around the world. So you remove very specific parts of your clothing and wonder how much more humiliation you can take. Of course we are now reminded that this is the one procedure that has to be carried because you never know how many members of the public may be potentially terrorist suicide bombers. You can never be sure, can you?

So you squeeze into your claustrophobic plane seat, pick apart the headphones for the music channels, weigh up the on flight movies and then endeavour to prise open a hot meal in a plastic container that looks as if it may have come straight out of the microwave. But summer holidays are enormous fun once you actually get to your intended hotel, it's all very enjoyable. Most of us plonk ourselves by the pool every day and then avail ourselves of the popular coach trips that take you directly into that country's innermost culture. There are trips to caves, lagoons, historic ruins, buildings of some antiquity and general areas of interest.

And this is where my lovely wife and yours truly came in. For the first time in years we enjoyed a relaxing five days in Torquay. When our children were indeed toddlers we'd exhausted most of the Pontins and Haven holiday camps and this year it was the South West English Riviera. We'd taken our kids to Cornwall years ago now but Torquay was much as we expected it to be. 

Now there are those who would have sniffed jokily and disdainfully at the prospect of visiting a hotel that had once featured prominently in what turned into a sadly short lived TV sitcom. Back in the 1970s the former Footlights Cambridge student and then comedian John Cleese had parodied a seaside hotel setting with the liberal use of very physical comedy, knockabout humour and controversial jokes about the Germans.

The hotel was hilariously called Fawlty Towers, a hellhole of a seaside hotel where everything that could have gone wrong most certainly did. Basil Fawlty, with long suffering wife Sybil aka Prunella Scales and Connie Booth were joined by the bumbling Spanish waiter Manuel aka Andrew Sachs who would become the butt of all gags from a helpless Fawlty. Then after a temporary hold on the nation's affections Fawlty Towers was scrapped after 12 episodes. 

The point is though that Torquay was flawless with no complaining, dissatisfied guests, no hotel managers struggling desperately to hold everything together and no sense of panic or mayhem. For my wife and yours truly the hospitality was genuine, the people were nice as pie and there was friendliness personified. The food was excellent, the entertainment beautifully English and the weather seemed utterly irrelevant. It was England and who cared about a couple of tropical monsoons followed by sporadic bursts of early summer sunshine? Life is indeed sweet.  

We had some wonderfully exhilarating days in Brixham yesterday in Devon, Paignton the day and a general sweep of Torquay's finest scenery. We walked for miles, up and down streets, along picturesque fishing harbours that could have been painted by Constable or Turner, darting in and out of cafes and then sheltering from the heavy skies that eventually opened with torrents of rain that may never be seen again. We laughed with the locals who had now become besotted with our darling five month old Poma Poo, a Pomeranian Poodle who is just too adorable for his own good. Barney was our dog and almost immediately he became quite emphatically the most popular dog in the world. 

Not to put too fine a point on it but Barney was approached by almost the entire population of Torquay and was hugged so tenderly that you wondered if Crufts would consider him for inclusion in next year's competition. Yesterday Brixham looked like the dog capital of England. Wherever we went in Brixham in Devon there were dogs on every street corner. There were dogs near ice cream parlours, hotels, cafes, restaurants, post offices, supermarkets, dog bowls with water outside every shop and every conceivable emporium. 

Then we ventured all the way up to Torre Abbey, a medieval abbey that looked as though it hadn't aged at all.  We then went back along the meandering sea front with hundreds of bobbing boats, trawlers and rusting trawlers that looked slightly neglected but nonetheless charming. And then there were our hotel guests all now seemingly happily retired and just delighted to see us. You took one lingering look at the tiny clusters of bed and breakfast hotels that still look as though they've been there since 1949, still in pristine condition but now pumping out digital radio rather than the Family Favourites that joyfully blared out at Sunday lunchtimes many decades ago. You felt honoured to be among such timeless beauty.