It has been six years since my last fly-and-flop holiday. You can blame the pandemic but in reality it has taken a while for me to trust my brain in any ‘being still’ situation. However, the Long Suffering Husband is thrilled because I’ve finally done it. I sat around a swimming pool in the sunshine.
The bit of the Algarve we stayed at didn’t get the thunderstorms that were forecast and the food was amazing, so it was an overall success.
I had forgotten how much fun people-watching can be on a holiday. The stories you build up about families (grandparents are the essential holiday accessory), old couples (beach bar t-shirt with the words ‘I ❤️ BJs on the beach’) and single travellers (Twisting ring finger and sitting round the pool drinking cocktails) grow. People sit in the same places at breakfast or round the pool. Daily snippets of overheard conversation enter notebooks along with weird observations about foot placement of the sexes (men stand/walk like penguins while women’s feet point forward). Translated signs lead to a story about the sunbed resistance. “It is not permitted to reserve sunbeds. Unoccuopancy for 45 minutes will lead to them being liberated.” These are the lifeblood of this kind of holiday for an invisible people-watcher.
Before I went away, a friend had pointed out that my powers of invisibility were slipping and that I was in danger of becoming a character in once of my own stories. She imagined a Quentin Blake illustration of a woman reading and walking. I have become ‘that woman who reads and walks.’ This must be due to my invisibility powers fading because I’ve been reading and walking since I was a child when I discovered that it was the best way to get back from the library on a Saturday morning. My parents never told me to ‘be careful’ and so it never occurred to me it would be as dangerous as old ladies seem to insist. Nobody has ever commented as much as they have in the last year. It occurred to me that it might be due to repetition, as I have been reading on my walk to school for 5 years now and that has given people enough time to notice but no one said anything when I was commuting and continued to read at both ends of my train journey.
After this holiday, however, I am certain that my superpowers have left me. I became a story for someone else.
The hotel where we stayed had the most amazing pool. It was 80 meters long and filled with cool blue water. I loved it. Proper swimming beckoned. Other people dipped a toe in and complained. Enthusiastic dads jumped in and made their toddlers cry by dunking them suddenly only to have to get out straight away. Women who look good in bikinis even stayed off the lilo just in case someone tipped them in. This was fabulous for me as I could silence my stupid brain by swimming up and down and up and down. After an hour my sunbed was in danger of joining the SLA and my fingers had lost all feeling but I felt great and my brain was quiet.
On the second day two people asked me how many lengths I’d done and were disappointed that I hadn’t counted.
On the third day the LSH had chosen the sunbeds around the pool. I always let him pick where we sit and weirdly, although the same table is required at breakfast and at dinner it is a different regular seat, the sunbed can be anywhere. This is not true for everyone else.
I was a third of the way through my third book of the holiday when two German ladies in matching swimsuits came past. They looked at us and tutted. We were clearly in their place. They looked momentarily disgruntled then one smiled at the other and said, “Die Schwimmerin,” (Do not read this in an English way - the story isn’t a murder mystery)
We were forgiven. However, if anyone finds my superpower could they return it because I’d really like it back.
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