Every day is a holiday.... living the dream

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.

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) 

The Porn Ultimatum? No son, this movie stars the ideal Holmes

NO ONE has said anything yet, but my limited knowledge of Information Technology dropped me in it big time last week.  I managed to inform  the world that my daughter Hayley’s partner Steve Holmes (that’s them pictured) is a famous porn actor!

My daughter Hayley with her partner Steve Holmes 

It all stemmed from the article in The Courier recently (www.thecourier.es) about my baby grandson Buddy coming out of hospital after his first few traumatic weeks of life. I still can’t read the piece without getting weepy, soppy old thing that I am. And I wrote the damn stuff myself!

I figured that if those words reduce me to tears, they  might also touch the hearts of grannies  all over the world. So I decided to add  it to  the  blog sites I set up when I was a lady of leisure back in 2010 BC (Before Courier, that is).

I  called up www.grumpyoldgran.com  - a Wordpress site which I actually paid to set up but rarely look at these days – and published  the story, complete  with the headline  ‘Buddy Golly! The miracle baby with no heartbeat goes home’.

So far, so good.  Under the article on the Grumpy website, a list of ‘Recommended Links’ enabled me to direct readers to Wikipedia’s take on ‘Caesarean Section’,  ‘Umbilical Cord’ , Intensive Care’ and other specific subjects mentioned in the article.

Rather than wade through all the links, I clicked ‘Apply all’ and thought no more of it...until  I checked the site a couple of days later.

The  name ‘Steve Holmes’ in the article was hyperlinked. Curious, I clicked on the link and, horror of horrors, was greeted  by the full Wiki lowdown on …’’Steve Holmes , Pornographic Actor’’.

The name may be the same, but our Steve is no dirty movie man. He’s a respectable dad, as our Buddy would confirm if he could talk.

But, having arrived premature three months early, he's not due to be porn until March 6th.

Buddy Golly...happy day as my miracle grandson goes home

Buddy leaves hospital...all 2 kilos of him

BUDDY John Harry Holmes entered this world silently on December 14, 2011 - and it was three minutes before he drew his first breath.

My daughter Hayley’s third child arrived 12 weeks early and weighed less than a kilo. For those first terrifying moments of his life, he also had no heartbeat. How times change!


On Wednesday this week, the little mite left hospital with his mum and dad, the intrusive array of tubes that had decorated and invaded his little body for weeks all long gone.

For the first week of his life, it was touch-and-go for Buddy. Dragged out of Hayley’s womb by Caesarean section, he survived because of her intuition that something was amiss with the 28-week embryo.

A scan revealed that the waters surrounding Buddy had all leaked away - and medics ordered an immediate emergency delivery.

Hayley and her partner Steve Holmes learned later that the baby would have died within two hours had he been left in the womb.

As it was, he survived not only those first breathless, heart-stopping moments, but also being half-strangled by his umbilical cord.

For a week, he remained in an incubator in Intensive Care, listed as ‘critical’.

Then the miracle of life kicked in big time. And when he left hospital this week, Buddy’s birthweight had more than doubled to 4lb 7oz.


So tiny...that's Buddy, not dad Steve


In seven weeks, the wizened mini-alien had transitioned into a chubby little boy - albeit still only the size of a man’s shoe.

Hayley and Steve had named him seconds after he was born, fearing he would not survive.

Instead, he has become a picture of health, so pardon this column’s nepotism as the family drink a toast to the little one’s future.

Mine’s a Bud, by the way.