Summer time, and holidays aren’t so easy
IF you’re the sort of person who goes on holiday to make new friends, now is the time to rethink what you consider a vacation, or a friend.
Choose unwisely and it will be almost impossible to extract yourself before the end of the break and you will be asking yourself serious questions, such as ‘Do we have to eat with them again?’ and ‘How does he put up with that laugh?’ Followed by: ‘Nooooh – you friended them on Facebook?’
I don’t want to be too negative. Sometimes, if the wind is blowing in the right direction, you can meet like-minded souls, like the German former PoW that my parents met on their honeymoon.
He remains a pal even though when he visited us in Scotland, as a child, I made him watch a movie where Shirley Temple singlehandedly defeated most of the German army.
Another upside is that none of the people you meet will be politicians – because this summer they all seem to be on a staycation.
Yesterday, Parliament Square was heaving with elected representatives wanting to hear Big Ben’s last bongs for four years – a puzzling busman’s holiday, rather like me having a minute’s silence for my recently-expired printer.
OVER at the Edinburgh Book Festival, our First Minister has spent her recess chatting onstage about nationalism, a topic that the rest of us would love to take a break from, while at the other end of the New Town Alex Salmond is in his second week of a chat show that allows him to beat his chest in front of a self-selecting audience of supporters and indulge in some pawswiping at the current SNP leadership.
His first guest was, pointedly, David Davis, at a time when the current First Minister struggles to have any dialogue with Westminster’s Brexit big hitters.
Salmond also talked about the poor handling of the Michelle Thomson legal case, and has staged chats with actors Brian Cox and Martin Compston.
It’s as if Salmond is still sore about being binned by his constituents in Gordon and is determined to convince us that he still lives life in the fast lane, even though as a politico with no powerbase, the reality is more the six-items-or-less lane.
Of course, in the US, the President takes proper holidays: at least, until Donald Trump, who has only just left his Trump golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey.
The White House is undergoing a £2million renovation – apparently it has a very big problem with leaks – so the President refuses to call his 17day sojourn a vacation, although the staff at the White House are saying: ‘For us, it is.’
Unfortunately, no one has taken his phone away, allowing him to continue to describe Nazis as history buffs, and Confederate statues as ‘beautiful’ – which is significant, since this may be the first time Mr Trump has ever complimented anything over 40 years old.
By strange coincidence, Vladimir Putin is also on holiday, which does look a little suspect; like the time your boss and his secretary went to a conference and booked into the same luxury resort.
Although, much as we sneer at Trump, at least he keeps his shirt on.