Holiday 2013 - Day One

I’m in Turkey. The country, not the supermodel.

But geography can’t stand in the way of a good blog post. It can’t stand in the way of a bad one either.

Don’t worry though. This won’t be one of those annoying holiday journals, full of sunny photos and descriptions of exotic meals. I hate those things.

As far as I’m concerned, anyone who willingly talks about their own holiday is a filthy scumbag. I don’t even want people to enjoy their holidays. But if they have to enjoy them, they should have the decency to hide that fact from everyone. Even if they’re directly asked how the holiday was, people should simply shrug and mutter something about mosquitoes.

When I see someone outlining the joys of their vacation, I feel sick. And as for people who post holiday snaps on Facebook? Vermin.

Worse than vermin. Liars. Lying vermin. It’s always an airbrushed, carefully edited selection. You never see photos of the corpses and cockroach vomit that comprise most foreign excursions. And to misrepresent travel like that does a disservice to Britain. If you chose the right pictures, even a weekend in Gosport can seem like a technicolour wonderland.

So it won’t be one of those. I’m not going to brag about the fun stuff I’ve been doing. If I mention an event and you think it sounds like fun, you’re wrong. It isn’t fun.

Nothing is fun. Holidays are always terrible, and this one is no exception.

Hmm.

I may have gone a bit too far in the other direction. I do want to avoid gloating, but I don’t want to go the other way and make it into a whiny confessional. I don’t want it to be disaster laden Watchdog misery porn.

It should be something in the middle. I’ll be even handed. I’ll give you the facts and you can make up your own mind. It will be like a David Attenborough nature documentary. Yes, there will be scenes of tremendous beauty. But there will also be brute facts of the natural world. Real life isn’t one or the other. It contains both heady highs and disturbing ant fungi.

I’ll start with the journey. I’ve just realised that I can write an entry for each day, boosting my post count. It will make me look prolific.

We got the plane from Gatwick, and we had a two-hour bus trip on either side of the flight. It was a long day.

At the airport, we saw professional know-it-all John Sessions sitting in Pret A Manger. It was probably the most middle class piece of celebrity spotting ever done. I’ve emailed the story to Heat magazine, but have yet to hear back.

The flight itself was four hours of being in the sky. We were flying at sunset, which I don’t think I’ve done before. We were travelling east, so the sunset was twice as fast. You can get things done more quickly if you work as a team.

The sinking sun made the evening look apocalyptic; big plumes of cloud like atomic candy floss. As night fell, the roads far beneath us glowed like rivers of lava. I ate some biscuits.

We were exhausted by the time we got on our connecting bus. We were told to put up the arm rests on the outside seats in case we were flung out at sharp corners. Lucy’s arm rest didn’t work, so I held on to her leg. I should consider seatbelt as a possible future career path.

We barrelled along the dark alien roads, hot and barely conscious. We passed strange signs in a language that seemed totally not English. It was as though we were in a different country.

We were discussing whether or not Turkey was in Europe. We hoped that it wasn’t, because it will sound more exotic when we tell people about it. But not you, dear blog reader. We know each other too well for me to invent minor geographical milestones. Except the time I went to Super Wales.

I’m pretty sure we drove past a shop called ‘Pedo’, but I don’t want to google it to check.

We arrived at our hotel at 2am and pretended to listen to what the receptionist said. Before being shown to our room, they stuck paper wrist bands on us. This was so we were identified as guests of the hotel, so we could get our free meals and wouldn’t wake up in a bath full of ice, sans kidneys.

I don’t like the wrist band. I don’t like wrist band as two words, even. How does the spell check feel about wristband?

It’s fine. I’ll use that from now on.

There’s something a bit demeaning about wearing it all the time. I don’t like being marked out. Wherever we go, people are judging us as clueless tourists. It’s true, of course. But I prefer the old-fashioned method of exposing my own ignorance through conversation and too much politeness.

The wristband makes me out as a member of a certain group. It’s oppressive. “Now I know what concentration camp tattoos must feel like,” thinks an appalling man who has nothing to do with me.

My first thought was actually the film The Running Man. Or is it just Running Man? I can’t check. The internet here goes in and out. That’s why I’m writing this in Word. You might find the font or formatting of this post unfamiliar. If so, it will give you your own flavour of exotic adventure. This is a reciprocal relationship. You’re feeling what I’m feeling, and I’m guessing what you’re feeling.

In Running Man, there’s a prison camp where the convicts wear explosive collars. If they leave the prison grounds, it detonates, and the wearer gets all blown up and that. I don’t think this wristband is explosive. But I have it on my left hand anyway, so it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

I keep wanting to take it off, but I can’t. It’s waterproof, so at least we can go swimming. But can we swim in acid? There’s plenty of time to find out.

We found our room, which is perfectly nice. I eventually got to sleep. Lucy didn’t.

That was our first day. It seems a bit negative, this post. I’ll grant you that.

But I’d like you to keep in mind a couple of things.

Firstly, we hadn’t yet seen the hotel or the grounds or the town. That was to come in the second day. So any negativity on my part comes from the inside of my head. You can’t blame Turkey for that.

Secondly, I’ve been re-reading Stewart Lee’s book here, and so I’m sure I’ve taken on certain elements of his writing style. He’s sarcastic and glib. I can’t imagine him writing a gushing holiday journal. Having said that, he does describe various interesting places he’s been on tour, interesting people he’s met, and life-changing experiences he’s encountered.

These are all explained through a veil of cynicism. But shining a torch on your life, even if it’s a critical torch, is still reprehensibly arrogant. Just because you’re glib, it doesn’t mean you’re not a dick. Just because your holiday journal is peppered with misery, doesn’t mean you’re not forcing strangers to read about it against their will.

It’s a lesson I have learned, and will continue to ignore. I need to keep this month’s post count up after all.