Best Laid Plans Volume 2
by Wendy Webb
Free ebook download: Best Laid Plans Volume 2 by Wendy Webb, legally licensed and available in PDF, Word, and ePub formats.
Try a refreshing summer drink (like the pic on the cover) and dip into this variety of themes. They are all different lengths, depending how much time you've got to spare.
Try a refreshing summer drink (like the pic on the cover) and dip into this variety of themes. The stories are all different lengths, depending how much time you've got to spare.
Enjoy!
From the book:
SKIING, STORKS AND THE MILE HIGH CLUB
There are three sorts of holiday experience worth mentioning. The first is one involving a memorable – and enjoyable activity. Nothing earth-shattering, just something for photographs, nostalgia and the ever-repeatable story for cocktail parties, “When I went…”. The second is utterly – irretrievably – life-changing and permanent. The third is, well, let’s just say, I’m still waiting for the third.
So let’s get down to suntan lotion – a memorable and enjoyable activity. I could name a few before boredom sets in, but here is just a taster. You will, of course, be pricking out your bikini line, if I don’t hurry on to the earth-shattering experience within 500 words.
I had always wanted to try skiing. Absolutely no reason on earth why skiing in the Black Forest was preferable to the London Eye, except that it didn’t exist then. I mean, The London Eye, or Millennium Dome. The Black Forest was – always – Black Forest Gateau… and cornetto in the sunshine. I did that. I learnt how to ski; zooming down sunny ski slopes after a glass of gluwein and – excuse my German – sausage and chips. There is nothing more satisfying than dropping your skis vertically into crisp snow – parking up, you might say –ordering from a menu in another language. Nothing more satisfying than the foreign dish arriving, precisely in an arrangement of meat and veg, as anticipated.
Now I have wetted your appetite; imagine what it is like to stagger out of an alpine restaurant, as a novice, rearrange a pair of slipping skis onto crisp slopes, while boot-laden feet stagger and click into a z-shaped skiing position. Nothing earth-shattering is about to happen – not so much as an exciting horizontal slide – head first – in a first aid stretcher sledge: I watched it, of course. But, heck, this was not as life-shattering as a broken leg – or neck –since I am still waiting for the third type of holiday experience.
There is one thing I learnt from skiing solo on an organised excursion from the UK: T-Bars are much easier to negotiate after a glass of German wine. Gluwein, sadly, was available before RE-loading onto the coach for a journey to the resort hotel, staggering aboard with muscles as flexible as Chinese knitting. Gluwein was sweet, warm as sunshine, blue sky and the view - before that sickening push off a chair lift onto the slope, the steep slope, the distant view… on shaky sea, not ski, legs.
German wine is perfect for a relaxed introduction to the T-Bar. There is nothing worse than hanging onto the upside-down T when you are stone cold sober. Except for one – memorable – experience. One story that you can tell endlessly to cocktail parties, funny tales, weird tales, long-forgotten embarrassments. The T-Bar is designed for a gentle shove up the backside – by a friend – when you have just made a faux pas. The T-Bar will accept one – or two – backsides of even proportions and a gently directing grip. If you are capable of hanging onto the skiing position-when all around you lose theirs – you can rise to the top of achievement’s hill, mildly flushed and exhilarated. Like your first consummate experience of a relationship. Try too hard and one –or both of you-will end up horizontal and very embarrassed. In my case, that embarrassment extended the full length of the slope, packed tightly with experienced pairs, all of whom reacted like a pack of cards after the first push.
Trying to regain your equilibrium when you are balanced like a pelican doing the splits as the amber light turns green, with a beak and three legs providing the only security between Niagara Falls and total oblivion, you will understand the dilemma. And, yes, I do mean three legs. The fourth – a ski stick – was well out of reach down the mountainside.
The wine, the lunchtime drunken tipple, ordered with the merest certainly of what meal would arrive, provided the necessary relaxant to safe sex – I mean, to achieving satisfaction on the T-Bar. Joining was mutual, ascent was heady, finalé was a first achievement worth notching on the bedpost. Sex was reserved for a much warmer, drier and safer location entirely.
Having miserably exceeded the word count, enough said about skiing. It happened, it was the first of many memorable holidays, none of them involving skiing in any shape or form (except as analogy). For a life-changing holiday the location must begin before Castle Mall, Norwich was classed as a dated shopping centre. When Chapelfield was still the home of Nestlé chocolate and not the birthplace of House of Fraser or other virgin stores in a brand new shopping centre.
Few holidays can be classed as truly life-changing experiences. A trip to the Lake District may well be life-changing to the poet experiencing Wordsworth for the first time, minus the daffodils. A trip to Florence may well excite the poetic urge, at sight of David – nude and perfectly proportioned to the muse. But nothing can be more life-changing than a trip through customs, ‘nothing to declare’, throwing up all the way to Norwich. I have jumped ahead of the tail – or rather feathers – of this tale. It began as an ordinary love story – wedding tiers, blancmange dress, arrivals and departures on a Saturday night, a close encounter of the mouse and email gender-benders. It ended with a classical Greek tour, kissing underneath the prominent stork in the market place, the seasonal nesting place of the mythic bird. We should have known we were in trouble when the tour party warned us against the hazards of tempting fate. But we were in love. We giggled about the classical route of ancient Greece: was it Athens? Corinth? Epidaurus? ..or the Mile High Club? We returned to reality with a bump – ventouse suction and stirrups bouncing to 8lb 3oz of bundled joy, perfectly timed nine months and TWO WHOLE WEEKS overdue. We did not declare our ‘duty free’ allowance: our ‘little Greek souvenir’.
Childless couples beware. A classical Greek tour, to the birthplace of the nesting stork, is a truly life-changing experience. Sending a potential lover on a solo tour of Canada was another – more risky, but no less life-changing – holiday experience. Holidays apart may make the heart grow fonder – or dowse the flames. A holiday together may be equally life-changing – assuming the little bundle of joy was intended.
Why the ‘Mile High Club’? One holiday fortnight beginning with… a relaxing stay in the luxury hotel at Gatwick Airport… that infamous cocktail party may imagine more romantic locations for a newly-conceived bundle of joy, but reality calculated a route from Gatwick Airport to Athens as the likely slide for a newly-planned, and much-wanted, baby. The Mile High Club was pure fantasy – as squashed as a baby’s head after delivery - unlike the daytime photo opportunity beside a stork monument, when all such birds were away from town for the season. Epidaurus, however, was most likely.
Epidaurus: a coastal resort in the south of Greece. We arrived during routine strikes, including infamous power cuts. Everyone is aware of the effects of British power cuts on population statistics. Imagine an already-romantic couple, blue-eyed enough to be planning a first baby, as the power fails over sumptious local cuisine. Imagine wandering through dark streets, hand in hand, to purchase candles and Greek matches. Imagine walking along a harbour quay, beside Greek fishing vessels, as sunset settles into night. Imagine the excitement of bustling waiters and a meal in a foreign town; the romance of that all-important candle flicker... throwing up all the way through customs. Then, like a beak delivery – not a postal service - our little Greek souvenir.
Then imagine all-consuming love of a firstborn, a love child, a family unit shattered by the unexpected. Imagine candles and matches wrapped in Greek characters; along with the baby-toddler manual. Imagine a child developing by rules not included in ‘Toddler Taming’. Imagine love-gift without translation – a special needs child. Few holidays are life-changing; ours was memorable in every conceivable way. A true type-two holiday experience.
And the third? The third type of holiday experience is when nothing – absolutely nothing – happens. It is memorable for nothing but inactivity. Sun, sea, sand – no Tsunamis – and the sort of meals that add inches to the waistline, but not the baby bouncer. Never, ever, a life-changing experience. We are still waiting for the third type of holiday. In all honesty, there have been no holidays – since the birth of our ‘little Greek souvenir’ – which have been truly memorable for inactivity. Every moment is a calm after the storm, the moment when storks have fled from the shocking calm of normality.
One day I will await the return of the stork with interest; it will not be wrapped up in the disquiet of delivery wards or hospital emergency dashes. One day it will be simply the grandmother’s role of waiting at the end of a telephone, awaiting the news of an alternative stork in another town with a different delivery of duty free allowance. Meanwhile I will enjoy those cocktail parties – or word counts and writers’ competitions – when I can relax into gory details of memorable, or life-changing, holiday experiences. If anyone is aware of a fourth type of holiday experience, one less-imagined than Wordsworth’s daffodils, or the London Eye in winter, I will listen with bated breath – but the stork will remain firmly in the fridge; or nostalgia’s photographs.
