The day I stabbed myself with a French chandelier and why I won’t miss foreign holidays one jot

WShe said something that struck me as remarkable at the time, although it was perhaps not all that unusual for a member of her generation, born in the 1870s.

In the course of her long life, she told me, she had spent only one night away from the Dartmoor cottage in which her mother had given birth to her a century earlier.

The fateful night in question was sometime during the 1920s, when a sudden heavy snowfall had made it impossible for her to get home from a shopping expedition to Plymouth, just 14 miles away.

That excitement aside, she had led what seemed to the young me to have been an extraordinarily unadventurous life.

Contented

Never in her 100 years on this Earth had she ventured even as far as Bristol, let alone visited London or anywhere across the sea.

And there I was thinking I’d seen precious little of the world, having by then never travelled beyond Ireland to the west, or Greece to the east.

Yet what struck me most forcibly about my interviewee was that she was one of the most serene, good-humoured and apparently contented old ladies it has ever been my pleasure to meet.

She had no strong desire to see Buckingham Palace, the Eiffel Tower or the Parthenon, to swim in the Mediterranean or eat tapas in Torremolinos. She was perfectly happy at home, she said.

In her opinion, travel sounded like an awful lot of bother, which she could well do without.

Four decades on, I find myself coming round to her point of view.

Indeed, I’m not among those who are tearing their relentlessly growing hair out over the news that opportunities for foreign travel may be severely restricted for the foreseeable future.

Much of Europe, we are told, is extremely nervous about allowing entry to British tourists, having seen our alarmingly high mortality figures since the coronavirus outbreak reached our shores.

Some countries, such as Germany, the Czech Republic, Malta, Slovakia and Croatia, are said to be considering opening up ‘tourist corridors’ to link summer holiday resorts that have been least affected by the pandemic.

Others – including Australia and New Zealand, China and South Korea – are reported to be thinking of creating ‘tourist bubbles’, from which holidaymakers from the worststricken nations would be excluded.

Meanwhile, the US Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, warns that travel to and from America may not be opened up again until 2021.

Whatever the truth, it appears that we Britons – along with Spaniards, Italians and others whose fellow countrymen have suffered most from the virus – may find ourselves waiting longer than most for holiday villas or hotel rooms abroad.

But will this really be such a heavy burden to bear?

Looking back, yes, I’m delighted that I finally got to visit the US when I was well into my 40s. That was when dear Mrs U, bless her, saved up her air miles from Sainsbury’s and gave me a ticket to New York as a Christmas present.

Not even she had spent enough at the supermarket to finance two tickets – and, anyway, someone had to stay at home to look after the boys. So I went alone.

I was there for three unforgettable days, on my one and only trip to the US. She still hasn’t been.

But what I tend to forget is my arrival at the check-in desk at Heathrow, where I was told that my seat on the outward flight to New York JFK had been allocated, for no apparent reason, to someone else.

Not to worry, said the smiley young woman behind the desk. A flight to Newark, New Jersey, would be leaving from Gatwick in a couple of hours, and she’d book me on that for no extra charge. Just follow the signs to the airport transfer bus, and I should be in good time to catch the plane.

And I was supposed to be grateful?

All right, this was only a minor inconvenience for a fit fortysomething travelling alone with one piece of hand luggage. But what if I’d been a mother with fractious children in tow, or an OAP with a bad back?

I’d have been wishing I’d stayed at home before even setting off.

And this was more than 20 years ago, before the new rules came into force after 9/11.

Who in their right mind would willingly fly from a British airport today, forced to queue for an age in those snaking cattle pens, before taking off our belts, jackets and shoes and walking through the metal detector, only to hear the wretched thing bleep, and submit to a frisking on the other side?

Yes, of course foreign travel has its sublime compensations. No photograph I’ve seen, for example, can fully convey the mind-blowing experience of walking into the vastness of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.

Astonishing

If I hadn’t been there on a family holiday a few years ago, I would never have understood quite how astonishing it is that this colossal edifice was constructed almost 1,500 years ago, in the reign of the Roman emperor Justinian I.

But then again, I can’t think of Istanbul without remembering that for most of our stay, we were worried sick about our youngest son, who was confined to bed in our hotel, suffering one of the worst cases of the runs I’ve ever come across.

It would have been unnerving enough if he’d been afflicted at home. Parental anxieties are multiplied a hundredfold when illness strikes abroad.

Indeed, I can think of barely a single family holiday we’ve taken overseas which hasn’t been marred by some disaster.

There was our trip to Tuscany when our eldest, then no more than five, laughed so uproariously at somebody’s joke that he fell off his chair on to a stone floor and broke his arm.

Recovering

Then there was the time we had a puncture in Normandy as I was racing to catch the ferry home from Cherbourg.

Another year, when we were staying near Toulouse, I was rushed off to hospital gushing blood from my head after I’d stabbed myself on a chandelier (don’t ask me how, it’s a long story).

Even when family holidays abroad have gone smoothly, they’ve seldom been entirely satisfactory.

I’ve found that the first few days are generally spent recovering from the stress of the journey, acclimatising and learning local ways and where to shop and eat. Then, as soon as I’m starting to relax, it’s time to pack up and go home again.

So, no, though I’m sorry for people who haven’t yet seen the Taj Mahal, the Empire State Building or Venice on a spring morning, I won’t pretend it breaks my heart that I’m unlikely to see them again any time soon.

Other countries can keep their corridors and bubbles. I’m quite content to stay here in my South London suburb – with perhaps a trip to Norfolk, Scotland or Wales when the lockdown eases.

As for Mrs U, who still has a hankering to visit the States, I promise that if the good Lord spares me, I’ll try to take her there one day.

But for the moment at least, strictly between you and me, I’m happy to have the perfect excuse to stay at home.

My centenarian interviewee was right. Travel is an awful lot of bother, which we can well do without. ORKING as a cub reporter some 40 years ago, I was sent by my boss at the Tavistock Times in Devon to interview a local spinster on her 100th birthday.