Summer Fun

The last Monday before the summer holidays. 90 degrees in the shade and I’m awfully glad I brought my straw hat. Funny enough my students don’t laugh when I put it on in the sweltering heat. They even look a bit envious. Good. I’m envious of their perfect bodies, their perfect tans, their perfect teeth and the fact that they are allowed to show so much naked flesh nowadays without feeling at all uncomfortable. Even if I had a perfect body I would never feel at ease like that.

My parents, especially my mother, came from a strictly religious background, and when I was young even wearing trousers wasn’t really done; at least not when you had to go to school, although it was something else when we went on holiday to the seaside. There we were allowed to wear shorts or even bathing suits.

Oh, that very first bathing suit! I remember it was red with a little white sailing boat stitched on the front. My mother had knitted it herself. Just think of it, a knitted woolen bathing suit. Of course it was a perfect fit until you went into the water, because then it began to sag. When you came out of the sea the thing was so saturated with water that the bottom immediately dropped down to the back of your knees and the whole thing filled with water as well so that you looked like an over-sized red bumble bee. With a super large bottom like that the shoulder straps became twice as long and the top dropped down to your waist. I know, I was three or four, so that didn’t really matter, but it must have been a funny sight.

Fortunately my dad never took a picture of that, because pictures at that time always had to be perfect. Film was expensive and prints too, so every picture had to be posed for and me and my sister had to stand for hours in the same position until my dad had got the lighting right. This usually made me look stiff and stilted, while sis often looked fuzzy, because she didn’t like to stand still for a long time.

When I got older, I got my first real bathing suit. Dark blue with white seagulls. I remember it very well, because I was so happy with it. It was made of some new-fangled spandex, nylon with a bit of elastic woven through and, oh great miracle, your bottom now remained perfectly covered. I never became a big fan of swimming, mainly because the water was rather wet and I didn’t like sand getting everywhere, but swimming costumes were never the problem anymore.

Although, there was my first bikini. Orange that one was. It wouldn’t have been all that bad, if the inside of the bra hadn’t been made of some kind of plastic that became hard as a rock when it got cold and wet in the water. Now that was really uncomfortable, beside the fact that bikinis were never my cup of tea. The material it was made of was not like it is nowadays and the thing still lost much of its shape in the water, so it was very easy to lose the bikini bottom while swimming, or finding your bra covering your ears like great big orange earmuffs when you jumped into the water.

No, I never developed a great fondness for swimming and now that I’m over the hill and will probably never be able to see my feet again, I know I will not possess a bathing suit ever again. I do like to be beside the seaside now and again, properly covered up however, preferably in a sort of tent of ginormous proportions, a big hat and loads of suntan oil factor 2000. 

Summer Holidays 2010 10: The Magic Roundabout

“Don’t you find driving on the left-hand side of the road is terribly hard?” a friend of mine asked, just before I was leaving for my holidays in Wiltshire last summer.

“Actually, it isn’t,” I told him, and of course I was right, for driving on the left is not nearly as difficult as you would think. This is mainly the result of the fact that on most roads (apart from the narrowest country roads) you either have right of way or you haven’t,  and when there is a complicated junction they build a roundabout.

Everyone on the roundabout has right of way, so that’s easy enough to remember and at the bigger ones they usually put traffic lights as well so that makes it even easier. It takes a bit of getting used to the very small roundabouts that consist of nothing more than a big white dot in the middle of the crossing, but after two or three narrow escapes because you did something wrong, you quickly feel confident enough to brave anything in the British road system. That is, until one eventful day you have to pass through Swindon and discover the by all Brits dreaded Magic Roundabout.

The adjective Magic has not been added lightly as you will soon discover that you need all the magic powers of Gandalf and Dumbledore combined to be able to cross it. I’m sure the dangerous Mines of Moria or the slopes of Caradhras are not nearly as scary as having to cross here. The whole thing was probably conceived after a night’s hard drinking while still under the influence of the mother of all hangovers. I’m sure that if they had built something like that at Dover or Harwich, no foreigner would ever have dared venture entering England again.

The roundabout consists of a combination of no less than six roundabouts at a junction of five roads. When you have to go straight on you have to find a kind of zigzag route past at least three of the white dots.

The first time I had to accomplish this feat I think I must have just pressed the accelerator and closed my eyes, only opening them again when I miraculously arrived safely on the other side, the sound of blaring car horns still ringing in my ears. I took a detour on the way home and am not planning to go there ever again.

Funny enough not many accidents happen on the Magic Roundabout, because I think not even the locals have been able to figure out how to negotiate it, so everyone probably drives extremely carefully (except the odd foreigner who is completely out of his depth).

No, driving on the left is not hard at all, that is as long as you can manage to avoid Swindon, or the M25, or the circular road around Cambridge (where I once spent an exciting two hours trying to get off, never managing to find Cambridge proper). I’m already looking forward to the fateful day when I will not be able to avoid passing something called Spaghetti Junction, something to be experienced near Birmingham, I believe.

No, I don’t mind driving on the left, but there are some places I avoid at all costs.

Summer Holidays 2010 9: Lilliput Library

I was totally amazed when Sue, the owner of my holiday cottage told me about the lending library in the village of All Cannings where she lives. It was a Sunday afternoon and we were pleasantly full after an excellent lunch she had prepared for us. I have been staying in one of her holiday cottages for years now and our little get-togethers have become a kind of tradition when I’m staying with her. Keith, her husband, had gone down to the lake at the back of the converted barn where they live, to help one of the other guests and Sue and I had been having tea and a good natter about all things menopause and other assorted stuff you don’t want men to hear about, when the subject changed to reading. She knows I love books and she asked me if I had bought anything interesting during my stay this time.

There was a time when I bought myself at least the equivalent of a suitcase full of books when I went to England, but that was years ago when you could still buy Penguin paperbacks for 25p. And then there were of course the romantic mysteries we used to love when we were teenagers. The stacks I bought of those taught me a lot about the language so they definitely served their purpose even though they were always read only once and then discarded and passed on to other lovers of romances.

Nowadays I’m a bit more discriminating in my choices and the British book prices have become the same as the Dutch so there is no real reason anymore to bring books from England, but I still love to browse, especially when I’m on my own. Here in Holland I never have so much time to do that at leisure. So after the holidays I still bring home books in pretty large quantities.

When the subject turned to books Sue asked me if I had seen the library in the main street of All Cannings. I must have looked rather puzzled.

“Didn’t you see the telephone box there?” she asked me.

I told her I knew where it was but I had to confess I had seen nothing resembling a library there.

“The phone box is the library,” she said.

“The phone box?” I must have look really stupid.

She nodded. “When it wasn’t used anymore because everyone has a mobile phone nowadays the box itself was left. Nobody had thought of taking it down, or maybe they thought it would look really British in the middle of the village like that. One of the ladies who lives close by thought it a pity that it wasn’t used for anything anymore so she thought it would be a good idea to turn it into some sort of book exchange. You can go and lend books from the box and you can leave books you don’t want anymore. I believe you can even stamp them with the date.”

I know the British can be a bit eccentric now and again, but I’d never heard anything like this before, so the next day I took my camera and inspected the telephone box. It’s a pity I didn’t spot anyone who wanted to bring or take books when I was there. It would have been really nice to learn what people thought of the initiative. Something for the Guinness Book of Records perhaps?