I’VE been singing a little catchphrase each morning these past 12 months or so. It emerges roughly five minutes after I ease my aching bones out of bed, wondering what new pains I’ve inherited for this particular day, and hobble creakily into the bathroom.
A cursory squint into the mirror tells me I don’t wish to see my sagging face, so cleaning my teeth is invariably a blind date with the toothbrush.
It’s little consolation that I still have my own gnashers (which remain attached to my jawbone, believe it or not) because they are as grey as a typical English summer sky.
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| Every day's a holiday: A long lunch break in Benidorm |
A few years back, I invested the best part of £1,000 in a vain bid to make them gleam like they did 50 years ago. Talk about being taken to the cleaners!
As I rummage around for the eight pills I’m supposed to take first thing, my head fills with the mass of work ahead of me for the next 12 hours.
Writing, editing, designing, talking to readers, replying to emails…life is certainly not a doddle at The Courier.
Then it happens. I start singing. Well, I am Welsh, so it’s allowed. And it’s loud as well.
The bit that might throw you is the words to my little ditty ..because work doesn’t come into it. The tune varies from Land of My Fathers to the Marseillaise and McNamara’s Band. But the sentiments are always the same.
EVERY DAY’S A HOLIDAY IN OUR HOUSE…no matter how hard I have to work. Because while those around me stress at not being able to make ends meet, or contemplate another boring day doing nothing but getting sunburnt, I am living a dream.
For decades we would spend our family holidays in Spain, Italy or somewhere equally compulsive in the Mediterranean – 14 days relaxing (kids permitting), with the Fleet Street rat race as distant as the remotest star in the next galaxy.
Winter or summer, we would wake up to glorious sunshine beaming into our hotel room and savour that unique atmosphere every holidaymaker wants to last or ever.
You know, the feeling that every day is a holiday…
Of course, it would end with that horrible, sweltering morning when you struggled onto that sweaty return bus to the airport before herding the whole noisy, moaning entourage back onto a Freddie Laker DC10 for the return flight to Hades.
Four hours and 40 heart attacks later, you were back in blighty, shivering your way down the aircraft steps onto the runway – and hoping an out of control airport bus would flatten your ever-moaning four-year-old, the uncrowned Princess of Wails.
Every coming day would again be a penance as the unyielding rain pattered down your neck. But there was at least the thought of next year’s holiday in the sun to keep the spirits up. Even if it was 50 weeks away.
Meanwhile, it was back to the rat race, the traffic jams, the pollution and the damp greyness of England’s clean and pheasant land. Not to mention the mother-in-law, those neighbours from hell and the ongoing war with the binmen.
Oh, there was also the obligatory annual drought, which simply could not be avoided. I mean, 200 years is far too brief a period for the bureaucrats to devise a cunning plan to harness all that rain and winter flooding for an entire year.
Clearly the poor reservoirs have irreparable leaks, because the problem is not drying up. (Well, it IS drying up but the problem is still there, if you get my drift – or rather my attempt to drift, cos there ain’t no water to drift on).
One of the perks of retirement, providing you have some sort of private pension to supplement the state one), is that you can afford to make that holiday in the sun permanent.
OK, it’s not as straightforward as that – I mean, the logistics of embarking on a 24/7 sojourn to the tropics are not simple for a dodderer (no Ken, not you).
It doesn’t work out for everyone, but when I start writing lists of pros and cons for living in Spain and the UK respectively, I struggle to come up with a single entry on the Brit list.
So it was predictable that when I bought my home in the Costa Blanca six years ago, it felt like I had died and gone to Heaven.
All I needed was some meaningful stimulation to keep my brain active. It was a long time coming but thankfully it was duly delivered last year…by Courier.
Now I’m happily working myself to death in the perfect environment, and whilst I’d love to see more of my kids and grandkids back in Manchester, I have the consolation here of a wonderful circle of likeminded friends.
Ah well, on with the hols.
Published in The Courier 9/3/2012 (www.thecourier.es)
Published in The Courier 9/3/2012 (www.thecourier.es)
