Facing My Fear of Farewells

One thing that really saddens me more than anything else, and a thing I handle particularly badly, is farewells. Not only from people, but from places too. Some places just don’t do it for me but there are others where I seriously believe I pick up a spirit, and I feel a strange, almost “goosebumpy” sensation when I am there and that spirit is around me.

There is no rhyme or reason where some of these places are concerned. Abingdon in Oxfordshire is a pretty town in places, but there are prettier ones all along the Thames. Ham in Surrey is fairly nondescript. Cliftonville near Margate in Kent, once a cheerful seaside town, is but an empty shell. And yet for me they all have an inexplicable gravitational pull. Some people believe in ghosts in the form of human spirits, but for me there seems to be an energy generated by some past event or period of time that seems to linger, and which I reconnect with when I set foot in these places.

There is more logic to the affection I have for my little bolthole in Portugal. It is a very pleasant place, both aesthetically and in terms of the life I enjoy when I am here. I visit Portugal for a week every year. In fact this time around I was fortunate enough to have been able to enjoy two weeks in very quick succession, but that was sadly a one-off. I can’t afford two weeks every year, and timeshares are frankly a rip-off anyway.

For my last five visits my wife Caroline and my son Joe have not come over with me, for various good reasons, although my daughter Rosie has been with me for the last two. Of course I think the world of them both, but they can look after themselves and being away from them for a week doesn’t tug at the heartstrings all that much.

Being away from here for 51 weeks is a different matter. All sorts of irrational fears invariably report present. Will I be healthy enough to travel, or for that matter alive, this time next year? Will they have knocked the place to the ground? Will all the friends I like to think I have made here have found better jobs and moved on?

Because, obviously, it is about people too. On most holidays we meet people casually and sometimes we become friends with them. Then we all go home and usually we never see nor hear from them again.

The worst example of this I can think of was a coach trip that Caroline and I took to Austria back in 1996. For ten long days the same coach party is together, long journeys from place to place, meals together at restaurants along the way, all in the same bar at the hotel in the evening, quiz nights and talent contests. Then the long, long journey home, a last evening as a group at a hotel in France, a few drinks on the ferry and then, at Medway service station, suddenly the realisation strikes that you will never have anything to do with any of these people again. For a soppy old romantic like me it can actually be quite a devastating experience.

This being a timeshare we do sometimes see the same faces from one year to the next year, and I take comfort from this. This year though the clientele was a little different, the week having a Country and Western theme and the usual karaoke folk and talent showers presumably having swapped their bookings for a different week or jetted off elsewhere. I hope they will be back next time.

I am reassured by the work that is going on around the pool, noisy though it is. They wouldn’t be doing all this, I guess, if they had plans to turn the site into a multi-storey car park or an international airport.

So for me it’s back to the grind tomorrow, hoping that I can raise the price of an “in-betweeny” for September or October, and hopefully also we can be here then as a family.

Can You Hear Me Major Tom?

Major Tom, you may recall, was the astronaut who featured in David Bowie's classic Space Oddity.

Whether through accident or choice (it wasn't entirely clear in the song) he became disconnected from Planet Earth and drifted hopelessly away into space, never to be seen or heard again.

I felt a little bit like that earlier this week.  Having arrived in Portugal for my annual working holiday my mobile telephone, which Virgin had promised me had been set to roaming, hadn't been set to roaming.  True, my business 'phone did have roaming enabled, but as I only use it for incoming calls it had no credit.

The booster package that I'd purchased for £40 from T-Mobile to provide me with mobile broadband for 30 days with "normal usage" expired after two days, meaning that either T-Mobile or I have a strange idea of what constitutes normal usage.

It took an age before it occurred to me that I could use the telephone in my apartment to call home.  Psychologically I had for some odd reason convinced myself that it would cost millions of pounds to use, when in actual fact it is only a few pence dearer than using the mobile.

For the most part I have been communicating with my family through Facebook chat.  I have also been placing myself under far too much pressure than is healthy, having assumed that with a week to myself it would have been easy to get so much done, only to realise (for the second year running) that there is only so much one can do even in a week.

As it happens I spent the first few days looking and feeling busy but in actual fact doing very little of real value and then, having subsequently got most of the urgent stuff out of the way, decided to live a little.  As I am writing this I am by the pool, enjoying the last hour or two of sun on my penultimate whole day.  In a little over 48 hours I'll be stepping onto the transfer bus to take me back to Faro.

Contrary to what certain people would have others believe I do not own a "holiday home".  Indeed unlike most of those who like to peddle these stories I don't own any home at all.  What I have is a timeshare, for which I pay over £600 each year to enjoy a holiday that, due to the financial climate, non-owners can purchase for not much more than £100.

But as the saying goes, I'm not bitter.  I really do love it here at the Clube Praia da Oura, doing my thing during the day and wandering off to Amanda's Bar in the evening.  I feel terribly selfish with my family being at home (our timeshare week is not compatible with the school holiday timetable) but I'm hoping that in a few years, when the kids are grown, Caroline and I will be able to enjoy it. 

As for myself, whilst I enjoy my holidays very much and look forward to them with an impatience that is difficult to contain I do like the familiarity of returning to a place I know and seeing people I recognise, even I do not know them much at all.  It is quite difficult for me to describe the inner emotions I experience when I return to certain places that I have been away from for a while.

My next challenge upon returning is to make sure I have enough in the kitty to return with my family in December, when we are "owed" a week.  Boa noite.