The hot sun really HAS warped my mind
I'm still pining for that gnarly old ladder...
I’m just home from two weeks in Arles in Provence. I did wonder, would that be too long to be there? Of course it wasn’t. I have this thing where we have to do stuff, to be on the move, to photograph and draw virtually everything we see. Usually, I find it extremely hard to just settle down.
Well, this time was different. Apart from being roundly mocked for wearing Jimmy’s size eleven Birkenstocks for a whole day (and not realising), and trying to conduct a quite hefty conversation with my agent just at the moment where a giant hornet snuck up the leg of Jimmy’s shorts, causing him to tear off said garment and leap about on the terrace, naked and screaming… apart from that, the holiday was all about settling. And I loved it.
I pottered about in our hosts’ beautiful garden, with its orchard and a meadow of long grass, speckled with wild flowers.
And I gazed longing at this gnarly old ladder propped up against one of their olive trees.
D’you find that, whenever you’ve been on holiday, you start wanting weird things? You don’t know WHY you want them. You just DO. It’s like there’s your home self, and your holiday self - and when you return from a trip your home self feels a bit ‘altered’.
An olive ladder, I keep thinking as I unpack, put a wash on and watch Jimmy mowing the lawn of our block’s shared back garden.
I really, REALLY want an olive ladder like Tom and Valerie’s!
What I’d do with an olive ladder in a flat in Glasgow I have no idea. I mean, we have a ladder! A perfectly horrible looking item from B&Q! And it’s not as if we go around picking fruit off trees. Any olives at our place are tough little bullets, bought on our Asda order at minimal cost.
The thing is, the ‘holiday me’ - the version I’ve somehow carried home, along with (possibly illegally?) a large, knobbly home grown lemon (a gift from our hosts)… well, this person isn’t an Asda-bullet-olive person at all. She doesn’t even know what Asda is.
Instead, she’s a person who plucks plump, luscious olives while wandering bare footed around her sun-drenched orchard with a wicker basket.
So obviously she needs a ladder made of old sticks in 1752!
(*‘That’s quite enough of referring to yourself in the third person now’ - Ed).
It’s dangerous, though, this confusion between the ‘holiday self’ and the ‘home self’. Here’s a couple of mistakes I’ve made.
Coming home from Spain, circa 2001: Mmm, that lovely gazpacho we had! How refreshing! I must make some in rural Lanarkshire, Scotland, where the rain is battering down so hard it’s actually raining inside our house, and my tasteless and watery gazpacho gives us all chilblains just looking at it.
Further back, in 1990, I went to Russia and visited a thrilling hydro electric dam and a vast frozen lake. I’m not being sarcastic. I did find Siberia thrilling - so much so that I came home and bought a vast teach-yourself Russian book that I could barely hold up with my hands, let alone make head or tail of it.
No Duolingo back then! No chirpy owl hectoring you to do your daily five minutes’ practice. I learnt about fifteen words, including virtually useless words like the Russian for things like ‘fireguard’ and ‘wolverine’ (all long since forgotten). But I mean, Cyrillic! How many letters does one alphabet need?
I do realise that this bringing-the-holiday-home thing is widespread, which is why souvenirs shops exist. Eg, Eiffel Tower snow globes. ‘Authentic’ sangria sold in bull-shaped bottles in Spain. Chocolate willies in Bruges. (‘Hahaha!’ That’s the sound of the one person who’s found these funny in the past century).
Jimmy loves a souvenir, but not this kind. He comes home with pockets stuffed with pebbles and seaglass to clank around in the washing machine, sneak into its innards and seize up the motor. And he tries to blame escaped underwires from my bras!
It’s natural though, isn’t it, to want to recreate that holiday vibe? I think with Arles, I’m just craving my holiday self, who had time to read three books in a fortnight, as well as doze and swim and untangle my tangled brain a bit. Rather than my home self, who spends too much time complaining about litter and worrying about mice.
That’s what we’re after, isn’t it? A way of being our holiday selves for just a little bit longer?
It’s not really about things at all.
D’you know what, though? I still want that ladder.
Love,
Fiona xx
PS Post-holiday I now need to make copious headway on my next book. So I’ll be back here in 2 weeks!
PPS My brand new novel, The Woman Who Got Her Spark Back, came out earlier this month and has over 100 lovely Amazon reviews already. Huge thanks if you’ve read and/or reviewed it. This book idea was sparked by a chance conversation about a local houseplant hospital with friends one evening.
Who knew that such a thing existed? Or that Glasgow actually has one? It set me thinking, what kind of person would devote her life to caring for other people’s plants? And what if her life was upended by a momentous event?
I loved writing this one and immersing myself in Celia’s leafy world. You can grab your copy here!
Haha I was thinking about this today! My holiday self considers buying fringed sarongs and shell jewellery, and even toys with the idea of hand tooled leather sandals and grown up lady handbags. WHO IS SHE? Weirdo. (although I reckon if you buy some string and go to Queens Park you could probably cobble together that olive ladder in 20 minutes)
The comment from the "Ed." in brackets took me right back to the Smash Hits days!