A few weeks ago I, through a combination of work, pleasure and stupidity, flew home from holiday in Turkey and, almost immediately, spent six days driving to Manchester, to Birmingham, Stratford-upon-Avon before turning north to Harrogate and finally back home.
I stayed in two hotels, a guest-house and fell asleep in the car half a dozen times. I grazed my way through Sainsbury’s bought sandwiches, Tesco bought pasties and Shell bought Coca Cola. I rose no later than seven and went to bed no earlier than midnight.
I became a wrong turning junkie and visited some of the unsung sights of England. For example I enjoyed the delights of the waste disposal centre for Central Birmingham. I circled the Morrison’s car park in Stratford three times looking for the exit and paid a brief visit to someone’s flooded front garden in Bollington.
I created a new way to negotiate a one-way system just south of Macclesfield, tried to fill my diesel car with petrol and made an attempt to pay the bill with a Makro card.
My luggage for the trip contained more shirts than I needed but I short-changed myself on pants and t-shirts. I forgot to take toothpaste, deodorant and shower gel but I could have held a fire sale of dental floss and after shave.
I decided to use the hotel gym to offset the late nights, and dropped a weight on my toe. Not to be discouraged I tried the gym again two nights later where I duly emptied a glass of water down my front and, a few minutes later, sat in the puddle.
One hotel wanted sixty pounds for access to the WiFi (sixty quid!) but a neighbouring hotel was free. I logged onto the freebie and it took an hour to download ten e-mails – by which time my lap top battery had run out.
On three occasions I walked to my next appointment without a jacket – and it rained. On two occasions I wore a jacket and the thermometer hit the mid seventies.
I gave one elderly lady directions in Harrogate – even though I had just arrived and it has been twenty years since I was last there.
If you wish I can also pass on ten post-codes where O2 mobile phones don’t work.
I have little or no recollection of any of the motorway miles and managed to think that Thursday was Wednesday for most of the day.
When I got home I discovered that I had lost two novels, a couple of pairs of socks, half a dozen pens and a piece of paper with a very important phone number on it.
I was on the point of moaning about all this to my friend in the pub when he pointed out that he had just returned from Basra in Iraq where he had flown on six flights, passed through twelve x-ray machines (five of which he had to negotiate just to get out of Basra airport), spent a sleepless night in Amman airport in Jordan watching the news and had stayed in a hotel in Basra that would have pleased Norman Bates.
Add to that the inherent danger in visiting such a place and I realized that, all in all, mine was a very normal trip by comparison.

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