holiday

Emails

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

Despise though I might the GCHQ watching of us all, I am minded to think that just a check through my emails when I get back from a trip might give anyone, with an ounce of sense, an idea of the life of a Sussex Housewife.

You don’t really notice the emails every day but when they mount up after a while, you can get a picture of the woman behind them.

So, here we go – a run down of the emails I get:

House of Fraser – now I am a hell-bent charity shopper but there are times when I go for a 70% off sale and if I do, HoF do it well. Last year in a moment of insomnia at about 3 am, I bought a Calvin Klein coat reduced from £350 to £79 – and I love it even though I already had a coat for every season/day/mood/colour/outfit.

I do have to say that one of my coats was bought by my mum from Oxfam about 40 years ago and I still wear it with enjoyment.

Mr Fothergill’s Seeds – up until very recently, I was a lacklustre gardener. However, the kind attention and instruction of my good friend over the road who told me what to do and how to do it, has changed all that. Now I can spend a day in the garden, dividing my irises and planting a hundred bulbs.

God knows what I originally bought from Mr Fothergill and why I signed up for his emails but I would have known nothing about what to do with them. Now I happily google what to do with my crocosmia and already the garden is looking better.

Thanks I have to say to Juliet, rather than Mr Fothergill.

Trip Advisor – now I know people are snitty about Trip Advisor but I find it a useful check. Once my best beloved booked us into a hotel in Lewes so that we had a place to change and sleep the night around a friend’s wedding. He didn’t check Trip Advisor who in no uncertain terms would have told him to think again and book anywhere but this place.

To be fair, it was billed as the oldest coaching in Lewes and was on the high street – but by god it was awful.

After waiting a while in the hallway – avoiding the sticky carpets, the jukeboxes and the very drunk people (at 12 noon) we were told that the room we had booked was unavailable because the previous people had trashed it.

Thank the lord.

I asked to use the bathroom to change and found that its definition of a shower was a hose attached to the taps….

We drove home that night.

Trip Advisor keep extolling me to add new reviews with the promise that I will get another badge – I am not sure what these badges are for but I like the idea anyway so I review away and apparently 20,000 people have seen my reviews.

I am not sure I believe that but I carry on anyway.

Refugee Action – now this is my street cred of emails. I read them and sign petitions but don’t do much else. But I do read and respond to the Rural Refugee Network which, as I might have said before, is a fab small charity which aims to make people welcome here.

Then there are all those sites asking for you to sign a petition of some sort – proper wages, the fight against people trafficking, grammar schools and so on and so on.

I sign, some of them, and then I go to Twitter and read Brian Bilston, the twitter poet and the tweets about the Archers and then I go to Facebook and check up on what other people are doing.

I had promised myself that I would never post a picture of any meal I ever had on Facebook on the grounds that I hated other people doing it – why do I want to see your breakfast?

But then we stopped in Thirsk for a late lunch – not least because we had misread the atlas and confused kilometres for miles and didn’t want to arrive at my sister’s too early.

Anyway, the best beloved was dragged away from the reasonable sandwich shop, protesting mildly, and made to walk a few yards to the next cafe where we had a wonderful lunch.

And I put on Facebook a picture of my quiche and salad – it was just so beautifully presented – and then I used their wifi to look at my emails……..

A Mission In Spain

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I do like a mission in life.

I would now like to be able to say that I was off to Lesbos to help care for refugees and support the over-stretched, very over-stretched, Greek people, but I am not. (Not least because I am not sure they need a middle-aged do-gooder who speaks no Greek, has no Arabic, no medical skills etc etc.)

So on the absence of a proper mission in life, I set myself small ones.

When we lived in Paris and the best beloved was at work all day and I had no friends, I used to walk across the city on small missions after small missions.

I might be going to buy a new wooden spoon and new there was a great cook shop by the canal, or I would create a trail based on Jewish shops and synagogues, or I would find yet another circuitous route to Shakespeare & Company, the amazing bookshop on the left bank.

That way, I learned a lot about Paris, and it kept me sane.

The best beloved hates British winters and wants to spend a month in Southern Spain in say February next year.

I don’t mind the winter, and have Oxfam, pilates, upholstery and other Sussex housewife things to keep me amused.

He wants a blast of sun and to write his book.

So, we went for a week to Seville to think about it for next year.

I really like Seville, enjoyed the tapas, nice apartment, Cordoba, sights and scenes and etc etc but I did wonder what my mission would be if I was there for a month.

Learning Spanish is not going to do it – before you, dear reader, suggest that.

He has suggested that, and indeed bought me a Spanish CD course from Lidl, but no, that is not going to do it.

I need something to get me out of bed early and cheerful with a sense of doing something purposeful and I am just not sure what it would be.

Before anyone berates me for having the problems of the rich, I would just like to admit that indeed it is a problem for a rich person but it doesn’t mean that I will be able to spend a month counting my blessings and doing bugger all.

We were in Crete recently

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We were in Crete recently.

I do realise that bragging about your many, varied and frequent holidays is not attractive but otherwise you, dear reader, get more on books, so here we go.

I have bored half the village about the lovely place in which we stayed so I will refrain from that – but then again I can’t really believe you wouldn’t want to hear about the swimming pool in the olive trees, the terrace overlooking the whole valley, the great food… no? Ok, then if you insist, I will desist.

But if you are willing to read on, I will mention a few bits and pieces.

Crete has a population of 500,000 and thank god not many of them are on the road at any one time.

They are not mad drivers but they do have a lot of roads which are very winding and mostly attached, rather precariously, to a mountainside.

Being an extremely wimpish passenger, I prefer to be the driver and anyway my husband is a very good map-reader (most of the time.)

Well, he wanted to go to the south (leaving our lovely place with its terrace, did I mention that?) to go to see where he was last in Crete – 40 or so years ago at the end of his finals with two mates (or as he says, ‘chums’ and he is probably the last person in the world to say that and not ironically.)

So we set off to Paleochora which had indeed changed in the last 40 years – who would have thought it? It was OK, not helped by a howling gale, but OK.

From there we were supposed to get a ferry to Soughia but I am less keen on being on a ferry in a howling gale than I am driving a ‘country mountain’ road up over the mountains and down the other side and then up over the mountains and…..

It was hot and we had the windows down. I felt my one arm getting a lot more sun than the other.

It reminded me of when I was young and worked for a union in London which was having its annual conference in Brighton and I was asked to drive down with some publicity materials or something.

It was hot and I arrived with one burnt red arm and one pale, pasty arm. ‘Never mind,’ I said breezily, ‘ I can get the other one brown on the way back.’ It took me a long time to live that one down.

Soughia was a place which had also changed in the last 40 years – from one tavern to about 10 and some rooms to rent.

But there were still people camping under the trees by the beach and it had a rather hippy feel.

Usually, when we need to find somewhere to stay, I leave Nick drinking coffee and go and sort it out myself.

But this time, I went and re-parked the car and by the time I got back (all of five minutes, it was that sort of place,) he had earmarked somewhere.

The room was fine and had a full sized fridge which was fine if you were there for a week and needed to store food, and did just as well for the bottle of wine and water we had.

But it was not ‘our place’ with the terrace and the lovely bed and the delightful food – did I mention how nice the place we were staying was?

Well, I need to end this otherwise it really is, what I did on my holidays which I know, I know, is really boring but suffice it to say, we had a lovely meal in a restaurant with a roaring log fire and very welcome it was – not often you get to say that about a holiday in Crete in May.