Wish we were there With no trips on the horizon, I’m reliving our prelockdown holiday
I think of the buffet restaurant a lot. For all I know I’ll never eat in one again
No holiday for us this summer, and who knows, maybe next. We’re not complaining, though. We know we’re luckier than most. We managed to go abroad just before the lockdown fell. A week in the Dominican Republic, middle of February. We wouldn’t normally have gone on holiday at that time of year, but it was my wife’s 40th birthday, so we’d booked a trip to celebrate.
I realise this makes me sound exactly like that smug middle-class man in The Fast Show, who is forever telling anecdotes about, say, stumbling across the holy grail in his loft, or his son picking up a Nobel Prize (“Which was nice”). But I’m so glad we were able to go, because now, unable to travel much further than the local park, I spend a lot of time looking back on it. And thinking: well, at least we got to do that.
I think of how it felt to take off from a Britain lashed by freezing gales, and then step off the plane into a night as hot and still as a greenhouse. I think of the man walking up and down the beach with a monkey on one shoulder and a parrot on the other, inviting tourists to take selfies with him for five dollars. I think of the pelicans gliding overhead, far bigger than I’d imagined, like tropical pterodactyls. I think of the two-minute cloudbursts, the rain so warm we felt as if we were standing in the hotel shower. And, banal as it sounds, I think of the buffet restaurant. For all I know I’ll never eat in one again.
I think about all these things a lot. I wouldn’t say I’m living in the past. But I’m certainly holidaying in it.
vYesterday I wrote about my son’s new hero: a highly successful, and ear-splittingly excitable, Youtube presenter from America called Preston. In case you were wondering, Preston is his first name. He doesn’t seem to use his surname – and, having googled it, I think I can guess why.
It’s Arsement. Naturally, I shall refrain from sullying this great newspaper with juvenile remarks. A man can hardly help his surname. It must be deeply tiresome to be told it sounds like something you’d order over the counter at Boots, and I’m certainly not going to stoop to that here.
In any case, I’m grateful to him. In Preston’s homeland, there is probably nothing exceptionable about the name Arsement. But he will be aware that his audience extends to Britain, and he will be aware also of its age profile. By referring to himself solely as Preston, he has saved British parents a lot of awkward conversations. So, on behalf of us all, I thank him.