MY DREAM HOLIDAY

Collected by Ole Nikolajsen from “The PUNCH Book of Travel“

By Alan Brien

I should start with a Rolls at the door. Out gets the travel agent with a notebook—yes sir, fix that smell in the downstairs' euphemism; repaint the children's bedroom, yes sir; complete your income tax returns, sir; polish off those almost-finished articles, sir; answer all your correspondence, yes sir. When you return, a year's procrastination will have been wiped away, or your money back.

Drive to Westminster Pier, where the largest yacht ever seen by the Thames Conservancy is steaming at anchor. A real, old-fashioned, Gentlemen-Prefer-Blondes send-off, champagne, flowers, brass bands, tears on the landing stage, and all, including a few suicidal blondes and brunettes. Hooting away into a starry, silky night.

Dawn landing on your Dorothy-Lamour island (Dotty herself, untouched by time or Bob Hope, still the best lei of the Aleutians, dressed in a garland and a smile, waving from a palmy hill top where the natives drag you, tenderly, ashore in their canoes. You can walk round the fearsome, but safe, cliffs in a couple of days—would you believe forty miles circumference? The beaches would take six months to explore.

One walled city, too small to need cars, full of attractive, happy, prosperous cafe-au-lait (the best lait, etc.) citizens in a permanent state of fiesta. A language you don't feel ashamed not to speak, but like English with a comic accent you can learn in a day. A hotel with a room on stilts out in the bay. No papers but all news transmitted by gossip over drinks. Drinks like childhood lemonade, but non-fattening, and alcoholic without hangovers. Food like fish and chips, but non-dyspeptic, and in every possible flavour. Ancient remains, only half excavated, where you can find a gold necklace by digging with your big toe. A volcano which erupts only at midnight pouring a ration of lava safely out to sea. Weather warm, but not too sunny, or sunny, but not too scorching.

I don't know who arranges such holidays. If I did, I wouldn't tell you. After a month, they elect me mayor, or even god, and I never come home.

By Basil Boothroyd

I know the place. The maddening thing is that I can't remember who told me about it, and I've forgotten where he said it was. It wasn't the place so much, anyway, but the hotel in it, and that's quite clear in my mind from what he told me.

When you get there, it seems, after an aggregate airport delay of six minutes, Reception behaves as if you're the one person it wanted to see, and knows you by name, instead of that air of My God here's another one and not having any trace of your booking. You are escorted swiftly to your room by a man who knows you've paid your service and taxes in advance, and doesn't hang around with his hand out rushing you into swingeing miscalculations in the local currency. The room has the promised balcony overlooking the sea, not the usual stuck window facing on to a main coast road. Hot water comes out of the hot tap, instead of warm and rust-coloured out of both, and gentlemen don't have to hold the loo seat up with one hand.

On excursions to see the Hittite Pudding Stones, or the tomb of Theobald the Stiff your six o'clock call comes at six o'clock, with breakfast, rather than not at all with no breakfast (meaning the last seat on the bus, over the wheels and with a broken arm-rest, and everybody thinking it's your bloody fault they're an hour late starting). There are no bookies from Bolton, or ladies who sit next to you in the sun telling a friend how they regularly take their teeth out at home, and not being able to is spoiling their holiday. The band is actual musical instruments, not banks of amplification that look like a Boeing control-panel and come right up through the legs of your bed. There aren't any gala dinners with all prices doubled. Or long, long waits for the last day's car to the airport that doesn't come, while you know anyway that you've been taken for another kind of ride, and that if you write the letter to the manager you've been composing all week he won't answer it.

Where was that place ? Or was he just putting me on ?