The WORLD is YOUR LOBSTER, MY SON

“Going somewhere nice this year?” barbers and other occasional acquaintances are apt to ask as summer gets into its stride.

I mean to return to “going somewhere” but for a moment permit me to dilate upon occasional conversations. Many quite like, even relish such time-passing. Not me. Being obliged to discuss immigration with a cab driver is, as far as I am concerned, the seventh circle of hell. Trapped in the barber’s chair, I find myself hoping that a light snooze will quickly overtake me or that I can dissemble one so that the transaction may be completed to the sound merely of clacking scissors and whirring clippers.

At my local barbers, there are two women who do a tolerable job with my hair and whom I have, over the years, sufficiently trained to meet my social needs. One is happy to be quiet. The first few times, she essayed: “Got the day off work?” How far do I need to feel required to voyage into an account of my working situation before she wishes she hadn’t asked? Do I really care whether she knows what my arrangements are? The other crimper is livelier but she is perfectly happy to swap anecdotes about dogs (or rather my dog tales for her grandchildren vignettes), even though most of both contributions are somewhat dog-eared. At least she does me the kindness of remembering that one of our dogs is a Great Dane.

There are two chaps there who cut hair too (including the new proprietor – needless to say a lot newer than either of the women because no barber is going to hand on his business to a woman) and I wouldn’t object to either of them looking after me, save that their only conversational topic is the one that bores me almost as much as reality television: football.

Going somewhere nice this year? Well, no we’re not. And thanks so much for asking because it reminds me that we haven’t actually “been away” since spring 2006 when we did a swing around the moors, the peaks, the dales and the lakes (not necessarily in that order) as a sort of honeymoon after our civil partnership ceremony. And it’s four-and-a-quarter years since we were abroad anywhere.

Are we extremely atypical? We are both at home all day most days. I have occasional forays to London, Oxford, Bath, Cheltenham, Bristol. David’s outings are even fewer and almost never more than a single over-night. I keep urging him to take off in the car for a week or ten days and he blows hot and cold about the idea but doesn’t take the plunge. I ponder setting off on a succession of buses (with my free pass) in the autumn and seeing where I get to. But we never talk of having a real holiday.

The first problem is the fact that we have the dogs. I always say that dogs are a much larger responsibility than children. When there was just the Dane, we took him two or three times to Landmark Trust properties and, although he found it a bit perplexing, he liked new scents and walks and soon settled. As he’s got older, he cleaves to the familiarity of home and is fussed by going further than our field. Twenty minutes away from base and he’s more than ready to retreat. We never took both of them to stay in a strange property though we have left them both with trusted house sitters. But now that the younger one is a special needs dog, taking them anywhere new is fraught with difficulty and imposing Tati’s medication and supervision regime on anyone else seems a lot to ask. Then of course house sitters add substantially to the cost of the holiday.

That’s the other thing. Like most people, we’ve been pulling in our horns lately. Provisions and utilities and … um … books and CDs are necessities. Jetting or even driving somewhere unfamiliar with no guarantee that you’ll have a good time seems a less sensible way to spend dwindling capital. On the other hand, we have numbers of friends in much more parlous financial straits than us who determinedly continue to take three or four foreign trips a year. I’m a little bemused by this but then none of them has such a comfortable and restorative place to spend every day as we do.

Am I rationalising in some way? My grandparents’ generation thought going to London was about as exotic an experience as the world had to offer. (Having said that, though, I remember the extraordinary adventure of my maternal grandmother, Fanny Allsop from Belper in Derbyshire, who, before she was married, got a job as personal assistant to Mrs John Jacob Astor when that lady was divorcing her legendary husband. Fanny accompanied Mrs Astor across the Atlantic on the Olympic just a hundred years ago and lived with her in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria. Mr Astor later perished on the Olympic’s sister ship, the Titanic). None of my other three grandparents, I think, ever strayed beyond these shores.

To my parents’ generation, “abroad” was still an almost unimaginable place. However, World War II took my father to Europe – he was in the D-Day landings and eventually got as far as Italy – and so the mystique began to dissipate. As a child, I was taken by my mother for a day in Paris and then a fortnight in Switzerland. Dad stayed home grumbling but he never wanted to go anywhere anyway. Our family never did anything unless Mum initiated it, organised it and oversaw it. Dad was a stay-at-home, only really happy in familiar surroundings, much like Fargo our Great Dane. He liked to quote that line from the World War I trenches: “If I knew a better ‘ole, I’d go to it”. Though we had seaside holidays in Britain, we never went abroad as a family. After I left home, Mum had a trip to Kenya with friends, Dad went to a bierfest in Germany (dragged there by friends) and the two of them once holidayed, most unexpectedly, in Tunisia. But that was it.

I have been considerably more relaxed about travel than either of my parents but it is not a compulsion or even a requirement for me. Of the places I have yet to visit, I would be sorry if I thought I would never get to Vienna or St Petersburg, the Amazon or Yosemite. And I would be positively distraught to learn that I had already enjoyed my last trip to New York or Rome, the Caribbean or the Far East.

I am not wholly persuaded that travel broadens the mind. My most-travelled friend (former friend nowadays) may be the most closed-minded person I ever knew (which is how he comes to be a former friend). And, as Sammy Cahn wrote: “It’s very nice to go travellin’/ But it’s so much nicer, yes it’s so much nicer to come home”.

By the by, that line I used as the title for this posting: it comes from Arthur Daley. It wasn’t written by Leon Griffiths or any other of the regular writers on Minder. George Cole’s son dreamt up the line and Cole paid him £5 for it and deployed it in an episode. I know this because, much to my surprise, I found myself acting as script executive for one series of Minder nearly twenty years ago. But that’s a story for another occasion …