Reasons why Fran might take up camping again

I am with my husband in a holiday cottage by the English seaside and, four days into our week-long break, we’re still tussling with myriad unfamiliar elements of the house including the heating, the plumbing, the recycling, the kitchen layout and equipment, the electrics, the heating, the plumbing and the recycling.

That’s holiday cottages and self-catering for you: you come away for a relaxing, restorative break and spend the week in a state of perpetual nervous tension, wondering whether it’s safe to leave the house in case the dishwasher explodes.

We’ve studied the ‘welcome book’: a plastic file that awaited us on arrival. It contains 37 instruction manuals describing how to operate all the items and systems in the house. It also contains helpful restaurant guides, maps, information about landmarks of historical interest and theatre brochures but we haven’t had time for those while trying to fathom why the heating comes on when we’re hot and turns itself off when we’re cold.

In the kitchen, there’s an automatic bin with two electronic buttons. We have pressed them both but nothing happens. So, we know it’s an automatic bin but we don’t know what it’s meant to do automatically. Instead, we’ve employed ye ancient practice of ‘lifting the lid with your hands and putting in the rubbish’, apologising to the bin because it clearly has potential that isn’t being realised.

The recycling arrangements took a few read-throughs before we could grasp them, a bit like a chapter from ‘Ulysses’ or a Will Self novel. I may have this wrong but the green bin is collected on Tuesday afternoons and the brown bin on Thursday mornings and the food waste on Wednesday mornings between 10am and 11am by a man called Derek whose aunt runs the local post office and who is having a hip operation in November.

Apparently, there are boxes in the shed in which to dispense all of these materials ready to put on the pavement on the relevant day.

However, there are no boxes in the shed. This mystery still has to be solved and soon we’ll be able to start a recycling plant of our own or perhaps an art installation made with teabags and empty bottles of Old Speckled Hen.

There are other more minor issues not covered in the welcome book even though a warning would seem appropriate.

The cold tap in the bathroom shrieks like a harpy as though the last thing it wants to do is let you have any of its water. ‘We’ve paid over a thousand pounds to stay here,’ I told it. ‘The least you can do is let me brush my teeth in quiet.’ But it ignored me, no doubt thinking I’d be won over by its cute little starfish plug.

The bed is twice as high as the bed at home, giving new Scafell-Pike resonance to the phrase ‘climbing into bed’. To exit the bed, I slide myself out of it gingerly, being only 5’2” and not wanting ‘fell through a ceiling on holiday and arrived in the lounge’ to be my cause of death.

Also, there are steps all over the house, tiny little ones at doorways and thresholds and places you wouldn’t expect an incline. Most aren’t significant enough to require much effort but, if you don’t notice them, are significant enough to result in seven hours on a trolley at A & E with a broken head and no access to the clotted cream scones and cholesterol ice cream you came to the South West for and which might put you in hospital eventually but at least it would have been your own choice.

Now to plug sockets. You develop a routine at home, don’t you, for charging phones and tablets and laptops? You know which plug sockets are free and when. Here at the holiday cottage, I plug in my phone and my husband unplugs it to make toast. He plugs in his and I pull it out so we can use the lamp. I plug in my laptop and he unplugs it to put the kettle on. He plugs in his tablet and I unplug it because he unplugged mine to make toast.

Finally, the mirrors. In this cottage, they are everywhere: wall mirrors, hall mirrors, bathroom mirrors, tall mirrors, mirrors in the kitchen, mirrors on the stairs, mirrors in the wardrobes, mirrors everywhere. [Move over, Plath - Ed.]

Forty-seven times a day, I catch my reflection before I’ve been adequately prepared and, I won’t lie, that kind of cumulative despondency is not why I came on holiday.

No doubt, on Friday morning, as we prepare to leave, the rubbish bin will open automatically, we’ll find a way to turn the tap so that it doesn’t screech, and we’ll spot some plug sockets down the side of the sofa that we could use to charge our devices if we weren’t rushing off in five minutes to catch the train.

Now for the regular diary slot for those who like to know what’s occurring …

Inside Fran’s diary

I’m visiting a local book club in May to talk about ‘Cuckoo in the Nest’. I love going to book clubs, either in person or on Zoom. Let me know if your book club is reading ‘Cuckoo’ as I’m happy to be interrogated.

Also coming up later this year are talks to the local Probus Club and Women’s Institute plus a gig as a compere at the South Warwickshire Literary Festival

On Tuesday 21 May in the evening, I’m taking part in a panel discussing author promotion at a Warwickshire Society of Authors meeting in Leamington Spa. You don’t have to be an SofA member to come if you’d like to sign up.

At some point in between all this I’ll be editing the follow-up to ‘Cuckoo in the Nest’, working on Book 3, and Googling ‘Glamping for Seniors’.