I'm not the cruising 'type'...

Yet here I am bobbing along on a ship!

I’m writing this from a ship on the Rhine. I KNOW! Get me! It’s a press trip and I’m a guest of my darling friend Wendy, who’s writing about it for a newspaper.

I feel I have to explain that because I am not a cruise type at all.

I have never been on one before. Never even wanted to. Why not? Because an opinion I’ve held my entire life is that a holiday should be as challenging and arduous as possible, ideally involving immense preparation and no small degree of peril.

I blame my parents for instilling this belief in me. When I was a child, we had several holiday camping in Wales where Dad decreed that we wouldn’t stay on a campsite. Oh no, campsites were for cissies! We’d find a field and ask the farmer if it was okay to pitch our tent there and sleep on the hard ground. Airbeds, too, were for cissies. I have no recollection as to what our toileting arrangements were.

I carried this arduous holiday ethos into adulthood. For our baby twins’ first summer, we eschewed a nice relaxing package holiday (for cissies), driving instead from London to a friend’s place in Belgium and then onwards to my sister-in-law’s in southern Germany and then onwards yet again, by now stressed, exhausted and crying, to the Languedoc region of France where regular readers will remember that the drunk apartment owner delighted in calling me ‘Slapper.’

Other highlights of this trip included:

• Having to stop and boil water over a gas stove on hard shoulder of German motorway in order to warm milk for babies.

• Driving with car’s roof box open so our possessions flew out and bounced all over German motorway (two phrases make me shudder: ‘I have something to tell you’, and ‘German motorway’).

• Drunk host’s sister joining us for dinner in her filthy white bra.

• Finding toenail clippings in shower of dank windowless apartment.

• Poor exhausted husband crashing car.

• Maniacal taxi driver driving terrified husband to Toulouse Airport at 110 miles per hour to pick up replacement car.

As our children grew older we found a lovely thatched holiday cottage in southern Brittany and returned there year after year. Highlights of these trips included:

• ‘Someone’ sitting on the wall-mounted radiator in bathroom and pulling it off the wall.

• ‘Someone’ taking the kids fishing and, while ‘casting off’ (or is that a knitting term?) whacking the float into a boat’s window and smashing it.

• And then contracting raging conjunctivitis.

Which brings me to holiday illnesses - ie, why are we besieged by ailments the minute we leave home with a suitcase? In Paris my bottom punished me for going on holiday by giving me the worst haemorrhoids known to womankind. Too embarrassed to ask for pile ointment in the chemist’s, I left the shop with a bottle of nail varnish. Further south Jimmy’s feet malfunctioned spectacularly by giving him the celebrated Fallen Arches of Aix-en-Provence. Meanwhile in Santander we were unable to find a hotel and so had to sleep in the car - with 3 kids - where we witnessed what appeared to be a drug deal happening at around 4 am. And in rural Belgium Jimmy drove over my camera.

Here’s me and Wendy on the cruise where nothing bad has happened at all!

Precisely NO windows have been smashed and NO arches have fallen. Although last night at dinner a Trump supporting insurance broker mansplained to me how to write a novel (ie, do my job).

Irksome guest aside we’re being taken out on tours and shown places of interest so we don’t even have to THINK, let alone consult a map. And back on ship we’re festooned with enormous quantities of booze and food. I am almost relaxed! And it’s - whisper it - actually very nice.

Although of course I do have a raging stye.

Love,

Fiona xx