The All-U-Can Holiday

So, my parents decide to go on "one last foreign holiday". Due to their age, frailty and general uninsurability, they go with Saga. And, I decide to join them. I find a stupidly cheap deal, but the one thing I really hadn't noticed was that it was an "all-inclusive holiday".

It was actually a bit like being in a 5-star prison. It's the first hotel I've ever stayed at with a guard post. Because outside was a lot of desolation and hungry cats. When the boyfriend and I went to Turkey last year, we went on a bus that took us through a winding Russian beach resort. "Wow," we thought, "Who would go on holiday there?" Turns out, I was staying there. A lot of the hotels have themes. There's a giant version of the QE2 (the boat), a Parisian palace, a Georgian mansion, and... well, mine was just a luxury box with great views.

Inside, it was sort of brilliant, sort of horrible. The brilliant side was that I could finally get to do the thing that English graduates dream of doing - waking up early, sitting on the balcony, look at the sea and working on The Novel. I could also see my parents - they'd already been off backpacking, had led a revolution on a bus trip, and were keen to show me that my Turkish wasn't needed to get around as they could just smile and speak slowly (If you've ever wondered if people really do do that, my parents do).

The horrible side was the hell that is other people. I love an all-u-can-eat buffet, but I wouldn't want to stay in one. It was like a bootcamp for over-eaters. The daily schedule went:
6-10: Breakfast
10-11: Late breakfast

11-1: Sliders by the pool
1-2: Lunch
2-4: Late lunch
4-6: Coffee and cookies
6-10: Dinner
10-12: Cakes in the bar
12am: Midnight feast

You get the picture - just no end of food. I forgot what hunger meant as a concept. And yet, with the unending food, people would still pile their plates high like it was their last meal before hibernation. You'd see people stacking four bowls of cereal on top of each other. Even more mad, you'd see them stealing food to take back to their rooms. In case they somehow felt peckish.

There was also no end to the drink. The hotel's two rules were "No alcoholic beverages shall be served at breakfast" and "No flip flops in the restaurant". Clearly this means that someone had tried both. But still, once breakfast was over, the boozing began. At about 10am the gins and tonics would be beckoned over.

As I was heading out one morning, I passed a man sat in the courtyard drinking beer and playing with his iphone. He was still there at lunch. And still there at sunset. I stopped admiring his ability to hold his booze and instead marvelled at his iphone battery.

With this unending cornucopia came a strange sense of entitlement. I don't think any of us staying in the hotel were nice people. One morning, a woman rushed passed me out of her room, standing on tiptoe on the landing to look at the sunset. For a few moments I thought this delightful, until she turned away with a disgusted "augh". Then I realised. She had been checking to see if her room had the sunrise view the brochure had promised.

If the people were bad, the cats were worse. The hotel had a clutch of cats, theoretically there to control vermin, but in practice stationed on guard outside the restaurant. Why bother hunting when there's an unlimited supply of food just beckoning to you. I'm used to the behaviour of cats outside Turkish restaurants. You sit on a terrace, and a cat will approach, tap your leg, and then wait. It's fair enough. But not at this hotel. Venture onto the terrace with a plate of food and it was like a feline remake of The Birds.

The first day I tried it I lost an omelette and the skin on one arm. I was saved by a chain-smoking German. "You need to shoo them," he told me, and then demonstrated. His definition of "shoo" was punching. He was genuinely punching kittens in the head. It was both appalling and kind of idiotic. But it didn't deter them from trying to get at the food.

The German turned to me, "You have to show them who is boss," he told me. "This is disgusting for a 5 star hotel." And then strode away. The next morning there were posters on the terrace "Please do no feed the cats. They receive special food." There were also noticeably less cats. I imagine they'd been drowned in one of the swimming pools.

The German gave me a little smile whenever I saw him in the hotel. I sort of smiled back. He actually wasn't the worst guest. That honour goes to the travelling English coach party who decanted one day. Within two hours of their arrival, the lobby was filled with tightly-coiled grey haired ladies saying "I'm not one to complain..."

The best guests were definitely the German Youth Football team. They wrestled, they sunbathed topless, they had water fights, they did headstands in the courtyard, and, like they were auditioning for a Wes Anderson film, they jogged everywhere in tracksuits.

The Saga element of it all was a little different. Imagine a hotel with beautifully decorated rooms in all sorts of styles, from Ottoman to English Library (one evening, looking for a late drink, I even found a proper nightclub, where a DJ played pounding music to people just like me in their pyjamas, looking for a nightcap). But... then there was the Saga Lounge. Somehow decorated in the ruthless bleakness of an Old People's Home. My mother would tell me with pitying glee of the bunfight whenever the rep uncorked a fresh jigsaw.

For me, the evenings were idyllic. I could trot off to the bar, collect some booze, and sit in bed, reading Perry Mason and listening to the roar of the sea. Only on my last night did I realise it was the roar of the laundry pump. But there we go.

This week's Tube Strike

Say what you like about the Tube Strikes (and let's face it, thanks to Twitter we're now expected to each have a definitive opinion on that, Woody Allen and dredging the Somerset Levels. It's the new Renaissance), but one thing about the last week has been that a lot of people have been cycling or driving who perhaps don't have the necessary road skills.

On Wenesday, a female cyclist in front of me was nearly forced off the road by a petrified wobbly male cyclist coming the other way.
 "Bitch!" he snapped at her.
And, out of nowhere, I turned and roared, "Oi! She was right and you were wrong, you fat fuck."
The female cyclist turned to me. "Thank you," she said. We then spent the next couple of junctions not quite making eye contact with each other.

Later on in the week, I went to the NTLive to see Coriolanus. The audience was mostly the kind of person who delights in over-pronouncing the flavours of ice cream ("doll-cheee-la-tay"). My row was terrorised by a loudly racist old lady ("The cast speak very well. Apart from the little Jew. A mumbler."). I finally snapped at her in the interval when she turned to her friend and told her the entire plot of the second half. I've not read it for twenty years and was kind of looking forward to finding out. The Sherlock fan next to me looked equally distraught. I explained this to her, politely but firmly. Nasty Biddy's response to declare to her friend, "Well! some people..."

There's a woman at the bottom of our street who stands outside a cafe screaming about Nazi Experiments with Electricity that The Government Don't Want You To Know About. I worry this will be me soon.

Jarman Academe

My boyfriend is currently obsessed with Derek Jarman. He's devoured the diaries, he's dug out his old DVDs, and he's been very excited by a series of events to celebtrate Jarman's 72nd birthday. Things kicked off with a documentary in an old Anatomy Museum and a talk in a tulip-strewn chapel. All very Jarman. All it was missing was Sean Bean being given a slow sponge bath by Tilda Swinton with bad hair.

Caught up in the excitement, he booked us onto a one-day celebration of Jarmania. We were expecting a Saturday screenings and gossip. Actually, it turned out to be a serious academic conference. A really serious academic conference. Once we got over our initial shock, we actually had a good time. One scholar explained how he'd recently found a first edition of Marlowe's Edward II by accident, another that Jarman cast Adam Ant in a film after seeing him wandering down the King's Road with "FUCK" carved into his back and bleeding through his t-shirt. All good fun. And then...

Back at university, I studied English Literature. It was going through a period where everyone involved felt guilty about spending their days reading books and so invented a lot of words to make it sound like science. Ironically, at exactly the same time, science was learning to use words to make itself sound like good fun. But English Literature lectures always had earnest people in earnest glasses in the front row, ready to pounce like Puritans on anything that looked suspiciously like enjoyment. "But what about Derrida?" demanded one hotly. The lecturer rolled her eyes wearily. "What about him?" she sighed, guaranteeing I went to all of her lectures ever.

Anyway, if you ever wondered what happened to those earnest pebble-glasses-wearers with their long words and forbidding demeanours - well, they've grown up and secured tenure and one of them had flown all the way from Sydney to be rude about Derek Jarman with vocab. I think the substance of her lecture was that, feeling guilty for making The Angelic Conversation without any women in, Jarman had hastily hired Judi Dench to intone some sonnets over the spongebaths. But here's how she expressed it:

• prolepsis
• analepsis
• catachrestic
• alterity
• binary calculus
• wholesale diacrhronic change
• teleological
• contrapuntal overlay
• chiasmic logic 
• tropological
• patrolineal obligation
• heterotopuan oxymoronic  miscegenated cross-coupling

My boyfriend and I spent the hour noting these down and speculating what she named her cat. He suggested "Binary Ganymede IV". The lecture pressed on. Academics around us stabbed away at their ipads, reordering their iTunes playlists, which is I guess the modern equivalent of playing solitaire. At the end of the lecture, there was a pause for questions. There were no questions, the academic equivalent of the Cut Absolute.

At lunchtime we went round the beautiful Jarman exhibition at Kings College. We noticed Dr Long Words trailing moodily behind us and hid behind a projection of a nude man spinnins slowly. On the way back in we got talking to a slightly gossipy old don. Who then won the afternoon with a gossipy, joyful talk about Jarman's The Tempest, and, in a demolishing aside, said of The Angelic Conversation, "Of course, he originally asked John Gielgud to do the voiceover, but he let him down at the last minute."

New Year's Thieve

Scottee's Camp was the most entertaining piece of theatre I went to last year, combining modern cabaret with old time music hall - but on a housing estate. OAP hip-hop, Dickie Beau and hula-hoop dancing.

So, when Scottee announced he was putting Camp on for New Year's Eve, we jumped at the chance. It was a great line-up to see the new year in with, and immediately solved the night - no need to invite friends round, no need to stand in a club telling each other What Fun We Are Having while reaching for another drink.

We got there at 9.30 to find things hadn't kicked off yet. There were a lot of balloons and Bourgeois and Maurice DJing. We sat down and waited for things to start.

By 11pm, there were even more balloons. And that was it.

"I'm bored," said the people next to us. They drank a bottle of cava glumly and left. Some of us were passing the time throwing balloons at each other. Other people were taking What Fun We Are Having selfies to reassure themselves (Reasselfies?). We were thoroughly bored. It was like being at a wedding with strangers and no sugared almonds. But, surely, at any moment...

A woman materialised at our table. "Hi. Are you having a great evening?"
"Yes," we replied politely.
"Oh that's great, great," she said. And then a tiny pause. "Thing is, I've got some emergency VIPs, so I'm going to need your table."
Being nice, and British, we stood up without a murmur. But we were furious. There were so many ways of handling that. But that was basically "Fuck off plebs" with a smile.

So, we were standing. In a room full of balloons. With nothing happening.

We left. Given that the cloakroom was somewhere in Narnia we didn't storm out. We sort of progressed. Like Gloriana. If she was having a really bad night and Essex hadn't texted her back.

As we left, we passed a man in an office. I wondered about quietly telling him what a disappointing time it had been. But as I did, an "I Work In PR And Events" Woman swished up to him.
"How's it going?" he asked.
"Oh gawd," she rolled her eyes. "You know. People."

We went home and saw in the new year watching 30 Rock and getting very drunk. It was marvellous.

Return to Bolgoslavia

8 years ago I went to Budapest. It was a holiday after a fairly exciting/gruelling few months of work. I had an interesting time - especially waking up one morning to discover I'd been copied in to an email from the person I'd left in charge of my project: "So everyone, this has happened. I'm ccing James who'll deal with it asap."

I was in the curious and delightful position of having to apologise for something that had happened while I was on holiday. And sort it out. Asap. From a hotel lobby using very slow internet. Ah well.

Eight years later, and I really was there on holiday, and it was actually lovely fun. There are two kinds of places that you visit on holiday. Firstly, the places where you immediately imagine living there. Secondly, the places that you go "oh, yes, this is fun, but that's fine."

Budapest is a probably a very exciting place to work. But, a bit like Amsterdam, a tourist can have a great weekend there and not feel they need to go back in a hurry.

I did find myself in an Aldi. People who mutter that Aldi is like a third world supermarket haven't lived till they've visited one in Budapest. There wasn't quite a turnip on a plinth saying "this week's star prize", but my god it was dreary.

I came away with a delightful looking salami with sliced mushrooms in it, but my friend Tim refused to let me open it till he'd waved google translate on it. Turned out it was pressed pig brain, and the mushrooms were the spirally bits of... bits of... *retches*. If it had turned up in a posh London restaurant we'd all have applauded. As it was, we left it at the back of the fridge for the cleaner.

One delightful Communist hangover was the service in the delightfully named "Marquis du Salade". Your waiter would take your order. A few minutes later, the owner would appear. "I see you have ordered Number 13. A wonderful choice. Very wise. However, I would recommend Number 15."

"I'd really like Number 13."

"Number 15 is much the better option. I'll bring you that."

Number 15 was, of course, marvellous. And I suspect what anyone walking through the door would have got.

Slightly decrepit elegance clings to Budapest like the mist from the rivers (and yes, that is the river that the Viking River Cruises Sponsors Mystery Drama On ITV floats along). We were staying in a flat that was like a small stately home, with a vast chandelier in every room. Even the bathroom. We made it to the outdoor baths, where, after a barefoot run on subzero marble past ancient statues, you got to plunge into water warmer than a washing machine tackling tough stains. Carved fish blew steam at you. Men with the bodies of trained killers frolicked. Yes, it was marvellous.

Also notable was the RyanAir "departure lounge":

Yes, that really is a shed. With grills, no frills. Your plane awaits you, cattle.

It's dead gym

My gym just died. It's been a slow and lingering thing. The death of a thousand towels.

When I joined in 2007, it was a fun little gym in the hotel around the corner. It bustled, but with the cosy bustle of a popular newsagent.

A couple of years ago they changed their direct debits. My accountant pointed this out. "What's this?" he asked. "Who are Debt Finance Ltd? Is this a loan?". That was a worrying sign. The recession was partly to blame - they had nearly a 1,000 members, but only about 200 ever came in. This was, it turned out, not an unusual statistic. People happily pay for gym membership because it makes them feel better about themselves. At some point during the recession, suddenly that £30 a month seemed like a luxury.

I offered to put leaflets through the doors on my block, but the gym owner gave me a look. "We don't really want that sort... you know..." as though I lived on an estate full of poor white trash just dying to combine their crack habit with cardio.

Last year, the gym had about 100 members. Which seemed enough to keep things ticking over. But you'd notice a few things. First equipment broke down. Then it started to disappear. Then the soap dispensers went. And finally the sauna became a chilly wooden box (a particular shame, as I was once delightfully molested in there).

A week after the water cooler stopped working, men turned up with tape measures. I've worked in enough doomed offices to know what that means. A week later the personal trainers vanished like memories. First went Costas (huge arms, smelly protein shake poos). Then the nameless hulk with the tattoo of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer on his shoulder (sadly, a naked Buffy). And finally lovely Manel and Daria. And then a notice appeared "We are closing forever at the end of the week".

In some ways this is a sad thing. But change is good. Turns out there's another gym down the road. It's a fiver more, but it's huge and has lots of equipment. And all of it works. Even the sauna (crosses fingers and waits for a prince).

Seminar

"Seminar" is one of those words. At university it frequently means 8 hung-over people mumbling through Anglo-Saxon translations. But, in the wider world it really seems to mean "Faux Intellectual way of describing a Scam."

We've a "Pop-Up Shop" in our street. It sells nasty perfume and miracle weightloss liquid. Innocuously silly. Until it put up signs saying "FREE SEMINAR: Earn more cash for xmas!". You just know what this means - some poor sods are going to be going door-to-door, plaguing their friends with nasty perfume and diet water.

A few years ago I was looking to buy a flat in Cardiff. One seemed incredibly cheap and I emailed to ask for more details. The next thing my phone rang: "We would like to invite you to a seminar about..." I hung up.

You just know what it is. A small group of earnest people, some taking dutiful notes. A snake oil salesman.

Our local snake oil salesman is at least wearing his nasty perfume. The problem is, it's clearly intended for ladies, so he smells like an aunt's toilet.

My Fear of Cycling

It's been a bad week to be a cyclist in London. The daily deaths are not just upsetting - they're selfishly frightening. I'm now worried every time I get on a bike. This is not a good thing.

There are two Really Bad kinds of cyclist. There are the 12 rare lycra dicks who sail through red traffic lights, scattering pedestrians while roaring slogans from Gladiator.

And then there are the Timid Cyclists. I'm now one of them. We hesitate at junctions. We hold up traffic with our uncertainty. We dart from lane-to-lane like disillusioned voters. Occasionally (if you're me) we keep up a constant chant of "ohgodohgodohgodohgod.". We're not reassuring to share a road with.

I'm not just spooked by statistics (although the internet tells me this is a thing). I find cycling in London really scary. I've been doing it in London since last century and, despite it getting more popular, it's not getting any nicer.

A lot of it is to do with Junctions. They're terrifying. Here's Bow Roundabout:

Let's have an aerial view of Old Street Roundabout:

It is every bit as terrifying to cycle around as it looks. Bafflingly, a lot of road redevelopment seems to be encouraging turning every junction a bit Hunger Gamesy.

You may well not know what "Euston Circus" is. I always used to call it "the slightly grim bit at the top of Tottenham Court Road". Until they started digging it up to build this:

Ignore the architect's trees. They've taken away most of the lane markings. The bicycle crossing. And replaced them with a free-for-all. Over the last 18 frightening months, I'd assumed this was work-in-progress. Nope, that's it. According to TFL this makes "the area greener, safer and more user-friendly... and improves facilities for cyclists."

Try cycling through Euston Circus. Maybe it'll get easier as traffic gets more used to it. But currently it's four lanes of confused and jostling traffic trying to work out which way is Camden. And somewhere in amongst it are cyclists, desperately hoping they've got the right lane and aren't about to be undertaken by that bus. Oh, no, we are. And now I'm in the middle of the Euston Road in the wrong lane and hello lorries.

I used to laugh when I saw Japanese tourists pedalling Boris Bikes on the pavements of Oxford Street. Now I'm tempted to join them. 

October

Did anything happen in October? I've suddenly realised that I'm having to backfill an entry for a month that seemingly never was.

A lot happened in October, some of it jolly lovely. I guess the oddest thing was, for an event, getting to work at a superclub. You know, one of those London dance barns. Actually, everyone was quite lovely. But still - so chic, so swishy.

I was sat in the soundbooth. Near me was an exotic creature wearing pleather trousers and a peach jacket with hair a few years ago I'd have challenged Mr Topper to recreate. He was filling us in on the difficulties of buying good cocaine in an Italian City.

"They sell all their drugs on roundabouts. They drive round them all night. So you flag them down like a taxi and then you go round and round while you do the deal." A pause long for an eyeroll. "It's exhausting and dizzying."

They then moved on to talking about how another club was trying to copyright a type of music. Which sounded insane, even to me.

The curse of cheap flights

The problem with cheap flights is that they can be so early. This, obviously, seems fine at the time. And then, at some point, you realise that you'll probably need to get up at 4. Which is okay, only your plan of going to bed at 10 with cocoa becomes a little bit midnight with wine.

And then, all of a sudden, your life is what it must be like having a toddler. Only with the horror of getting abroad.

Most of the time it goes all right - but we got Hamburg wrong. We should have napped as soon as we got to the hotel. Instead we wandered blearily around all morning before crashing just after lunch. We woke up at 6, groggy, went out for one drink, then lurched back to the hotel and had an early night, sleeping in so that we missed the chance to go on a boat/bus or walking tour. We walked to a bridge and then left.

At some point, more by luck than anything else, we found the giant miniature railway exhibition. Which was amazing. But we were off our heads on sleepiness so just ran around giggling. Even trains were a bit wasted on us.