Maybe Next Year...

​Today’s blog post is for all the swans who are sitting alone, (or together), in high street (or back street) coffee shops, or at their kitchen tables, nursing huge mugs of coffee, plodding through pastry, and looking out at the rain, and the near-deserted high streets, and wondering how it can possibly be that everyone else is on holiday.


It happens to me every year. I get through the winter and the dreary early months by promising myself that this summer I’ll go on holiday. I look at travel programmes and read travel articles, and subscribe to holiday and travel newsletters and special offer websites, and spend many happy hours choosing where I will go, what I will do, when I will fit it into my (admittedly not that busy) schedule.


At this point other swans of my acquaintance are just waiting to see that their children are settled back into college, or that their parents are happier now that can get out into their gardens, or for work colleagues to commit to their holiday weeks, so we can fit ours in, and so on.


That takes us to the beginning of June, by which time I’ve realised that I can’t really afford a proper holiday, but if  get through this current contract/freelance workload or if I get any of the work I've pitched for so far this year, then I’ll treat myself to a holiday. My fellow swans have accidentally volunteered to house-sit, cat-sit, plant or pet feed for their holidaying friends, families and neighbours, and have offered to drive teenagers to festivals, or to universities. Summer is charging towards us faster than you can say ‘I don't suppose you could possibly get up at four am and drive us to Heathrow, to save us paying to park the car?’


By now I've resorted to looking for articles called things like ‘It’s not too late to get a last minute deal’, and ‘Places which are still hot and sunny in September’. (Note to self, based on memory - nothing is more painful than a biting wind off the Aegean sea hitting the sunburn delivered  by the hot breeze coming from the other direction only the day before).


And hello it’s August and here we all are, in our cardigans and socks, scrolling through Facebook and looking at pictures of other swans on terraces with pink drinks, on the decks of boats at sunset, strolling along, theirbrown feet in their well-worn espadrilles, through the bougainvillea-strewn cobbled streets of Italian hill towns. And every second tweet proclaims ‘we’re here at last!’ and #heavenonearth.


And I sit in the rain and wonder whether it’s too late to become the sort of person who always carries her passport, checks in her bag for a spare pair of knickers, and a clean T-shirt, and heads to the airport on a whim, to catch a plane to ‘anywhere, just anywhere’. Maybe I’ll do that next year. Maybe I’ll go now.