'Abroad is utterly bloody and all foreigners are fiends'
PAUL JOHNSON
Now that the London season is virtually oNer, people are thinking of holidays. I never take them. The idea of going to a hotel, at a 'resort', is abhorrent to me. I am a bit Whiggish in these matters. I like to stay in my own house in the country, or in other people's, and go on writing and painting. It is decades since I have been on a Mediterranean beach. But I love hills and mountains, to walk, to paint, to gaze upon. So for me this time of year is always a round of the Quantocks, the Lake District, the Highlands, the Alps. I never tire of what Dr Johnson called 'considerable protuberances'. I don't mind the rain. If it pours. I write or do still-life indoors. As a matter of fact, I like rain, particularly in summer. This last, sodden month, the lingering remains of my Giant Depression finally lifted and I began thinking hard about my next book. I look out into my rain-green garden, where even Turn Tum, the odious woodpigeon, eyes me with despair, and find I have not been so happy for years. The sun we have had this week is, I trust, deceptive.
Here are some resorts I have been to and hated. Bali, where I was making TV documentaries with a mutinous film crew; nothing worth eating except bananas, and plainish dusky maidens clamouring for dollars. Malta, summed up by Byron: 'Bells, yells and smells.' Barbados: an exquisite inferno inhabited mainly by mosquitoes. St Tropez: all-pervasive stench of smouldering tyre-rubber, Nivea cream, garlic and cooking oil; frogs. too. Rio de Janeiro: the megalopolis of strident, unabashed, unpunished. triumphalist thieving and mendicancy; all the pretty girls have emigrated. San Francisco: cable cars reaching up into the sky, as Tony Bennett chirrups in the song, but the sky itself obscured by a peculiar miasma of unknown meteorological origin; Aids germs? Machu Piccu: Inca site again buried under dense archaeological layers of package tourists. Mykonos: abode of free love, which reminds me of Virgil again: timeo Danaos et dona ferentes (trans]: if it's free, and Greek, there's bound to be a catch). Miami: a hundred square miles of sizzling, sweaty nothing, the argot a debased Spanish. Palm Beach: even worse because nouveau.
As for places I haven't been to: I don't like the sound of this latest holiday paradise off the coast of Thailand, now villarised by the super-rich who got out of Hong Kong in time, and where a cook earns $5,000 a week. (Sounds ideal for Cherie, though.) In Kathmandu, there are no more bare feet: too many needles about, not pine ones either. The approach slopes of Everest, 1(2 and Kanchenjunga are vitamin-pill and anorak rubbish-dumps, Anchorage is awash with condoms and Coke bottles, and the new summer hotspots in Siberia sound as grim as when Dostoevsky was an unwilling patron. Yachting? All the good anchorages are booked up weeks, months ahead, and the boats themselves are creaking with vintage Lanson Louts. and Caviar Cuties having their silicones stroked.
Now enough of this bad-tempered carping, Johnson. Pull yourself together and say something nice for a change. Right. If I were forced to go on holiday, I might go back to Vichy: quiet, empty hotels, with silent, sepulchral service and superb food, guiltily consumed by martyrs de foie; elderly gents, survivors of Paul Reynaud's last cabinet prive., in one corner of the spa, while lanky crones who used to model for Captain Molyneux crochet in another. Solitaty walks through the gardens and woods, where the odd grue hides under a sunshade. Or BadenBaden, if you like well-nourished blondes and the flash of concealed lederhosen; everything a bit moth-eaten in a gematlich way, and the carefully flagged ambles through the woods still punctuated by stazioni from which to relish the views. Even better, in my view, is Annecy on the delectable lake of that name, with the best restaurant in France not far away. Ever read Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner? That sort of thing. But, like almost everything else, best out of season.
There are, to be sure, places in these islands I might like to see again. Tenby, for instance, where George Eliot learnt to be a creative writer, and where she and her grubby paramour, George Henry Lewes, studied marine life on the marvellous beaches and
rock pools there. They had just read Charles Kingsley's new book, Glaucus: Or the Wonders of the Shore (1855). Another enchanting, though alas now much-visited place, is Ludlow, famous for its magnificent castle, where Milton's Comus had its first performance. It has splendid second-hand bookshops and low-profile celebrities living in arcane retirement. Then, on the East Anglian coast, there is Aldeburgh, with a pebble beach of peculiar desolation, which Proust would have loved, not yet completely ruined by music-lovers; and, still better, Frinton, the last resort in England to acquire a pub — there is still only one — which has never been littered and scented by a fishand-chip shop. I call it Cranford-by-the-Sea. What do these places have in common? A certain affronted dignity, like a dowager peering through her lorgnette at an offending object, a whiff of stuffy morals and stiff clothes, a feeble and ultimately unsuccessful but nonetheless noble attempt to halt the march of time. If I ever were to follow the seasonal fashion, what I should want is a holiday from the modern world. And who or where could provide that? There is no such thing as Peter Simple Package Tours or Colonel Sibthorpe's Adventure Safaris.
I prefer, indeed, to take a holiday in my library armchair and read, for example, about Queen Victoria's 1868 trip to Lucerne, where she occupied the Pension Wallace overlooking the lake. It is fully described in her own letters and diary (and excellent watercolours), and in Peter Arengo-Jones's delightful book, Queen Victoria in Switzerland. Or there is the Mercian Sybil's recollection of Ilfracombe and other trips, printed in The Journals of George Eliot, not riveting, more cerebral; meaty. And for fluff-fluff, to use one of his favourite expressions, we can follow the first Eastern sorties of Byron, covered in Volumes I and II of Leslie Marchand's edition of his Letters and Journals, a real, naughty treat. And there are so many more such accounts. No fiddling with euros. No al-Qa'ala frissons at airports. No getting stuck in the Chunnel or some horrible Swiss pseudo-efficient bore-hole. No howling kids, all-night pop in the piazza, gippy tummy, avaricious insolence. Just the occasional susurrus of the page being turned and the soft fizz of beaded bubbles winking at the brim of your glass. To hell with holidays, and damn vacations!
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