Sunday 22nd February – I channel Violet Elizabeth

Am feeling a bit less gruesome today.  I am fine as long as I lurch from feeding place to feeding place with not much hanging about in between.  It is always better if there is a chaise longue of death somewhere around for me to loll on when my batteries start to fizzle out.  I realise that this is not a viable life style for a woman with three children and an extremely grubby kitchen, so despite having talked myself out of going to the doctors again this morning when I got up and didn’t feel like Madame Death, I have now reluctantly, and with much Violet Elizabeth style sulking, talked myself back into it again.  Bah.

Jason suggested that we plan our yearly Boo household holidays in order to cheer ourselves up and remind ourselves that a bleak Midlands landscape smothered in drizzle is not the only view in the world.  This was a good idea and has sustained me in frenzied bursts of internets activities throughout what has otherwise been a fairly long day. 

We dreamed of last year when we spent a month in Canada.  We found a very cheap, clean and functional looking house in an area we like for under two thousand pounds for the month.  So far, so brilliant.  Then we added air fares for five people on top.  Not so brilliant but still maybe viable if we go back to visiting Asda and whittling our own shoes out of turnips.  Then Jason pointed out that this is all well and good, but he is a contractor.  This means that he is self employed and whores himself out to corporate bee hatches for money.  This also means that he doesn’t get sick pay and holiday pay and all that other stuff.  Usually his pay packet compensates for this.  Unfortunately when we go on holiday he doesn’t earn a pay packet and the losses he will sustain by taking a month off work are suddenly added to our holiday ‘costs’, and make our eyes water.  We gulp a lot.

After that we look at Vegas baby.  The kids are mad keen to go back.  They love it there.  Jason is mad keen to go back. He loves it there.  I don’t mind it, but only if we do five star with chandeliers and hot and cold running service.  I don’t do flea pit in Nevada in over 100 degree heat.  I just don’t.  We look at prices.  It may work if we go for half an hour next Tuesday.  We put that to one side for future cogitation.

Then Jason decides we may be able to do a fortnight somewhere in Europe, sometime in May.  This way there will be significantly less travel costs and money lost and stuff and things and general down sizing and shrinking of stuff.  I decide I really need to go to Sicily.  I have always wanted to go.  It will be hot.  We can swim.  The kids can eat pasta and ice cream until it falls out their ears.  I can force them to trail around Byzantine ruins until they poke my eyes out with sticks and all will be well. 

I find a fabulous, fabulous site.  The first place I find on this site has won the Conde Naste traveller award for best villa in the universe ever.  Naturally this is the first one I click on.  I fall in love at first sight.  It is glorious.  It is gorgeous.  It is other superlatives beginning with G.  It is gargantuanlly expensive.  It is ten grand for a week.  Ten thousand pounds.  This is not quite what Jason had in mind. 

Naturally, now that I have seen it I have decided that this is the only possible place I could go on holiday.  I cannot get it out of my mind.  I look at other, significantly less expensive villas.  They are lovely.  Nearly all of them will do.  Some of them are even vaguely within our budget.  I desultorily make a list of these charming abodes.  Then the list explodes and disappears into the ether.  I take this as a sign that only the original villa will do. I realise that I am about to melt down into a massively petulant, whinging sulk from the darkest regions of the backside of my psyche.  This is a sulk which is totally shameful given the fact that a) Jason is willing to take us on holiday at all given our interesting financial situation and the fact that the money would be better spent on something practical like diminishing our mounting debts rather than adding to them, b) lots of people currently don’t even have a house let alone a holiday and c) it is not as if I am a deprived woman eating swede tops and living in a coal scuttle at the worst of times.  I am selfish and horrible.

I know this and still I sulk.  I decide that I must stop looking at holidays.  It is turning me into a raging egomaniac and if I cannot control myself I will have rung up and booked somewhere plastic melting and Jason will kill me.

I shall look again tomorrow when I have managed to get my internal Donatella Versace under control.

We did by the way, start by looking at English holidays.  We reasoned that English holidays would be cheaper, more accessible and less stress free than foreign holidays and that given the current financial crisis, it might be nice to stay somewhere local and support our ailing economy.  Noble sentiments I am sure you will agree.

We do not do hotels.  British hotels are generally hideous unless they are hand crafted and therefore eye wateringly expensive.  Plus we are noisy, sticky and disruptive and like to eat biscuits in bed at eleven o’clock in the morning should we so desire.  This tends to interfere with house keeping and other things.  We shun hotels unless we are pretending that we have no children.  It is safer that way.

It turns out that there are two types of self catering holiday in Britain today.  You can either stay in a modified dustbin complete with ash and potato peelings, somewhere in the middle of a sink estate in Scarborough for a fiver, or you can stay in a mansion for thousands and thousands of pounds.  I found a wonderful place.  It was gorgeous.  It was a renovated water tower.  It was near Warrington which I thought might bring the price down given the fact that Warrington is one of the lower circles of hell.  It may have done, but it was still six grand for a week. 

Six grand to stay in a water tower in Warrington.  For five you can come and stay in my glass recycling bin in Glenfield.  Sod it, I’ll throw in sandwiches and a duvet as well.

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