Showing posts with label Holidays. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Holidays. Show all posts



It was our first trip to Sweden. As we soared in over Norway, gazing out the window of our Scandinavian Airways carrier we marvelled at the sheer preponderance of fjords and rivers that crisscrossed the terrain. Bleak and desolate it nevertheless beckoned with its offer of unremitting solitude.

From the air Stockholm looked massive, almost like flying into London I remarked to my wife. But the difference in population is immense, London having about four or five times the populace of the Swedish capital.

Like New York, Stockholm is built on a series of islands or archipelagos as the Swedes prefer to call them. 12 in all I think, linked by interconnecting bridges. In prison I frequently received postcards or photos of the country’s beautiful lakes but had little idea just how central water is to the topography. For a short time during the blanket protest, before a vindictive screw stole it, a postcard from Sweden was the one dash of colour in our cell. So it was with some reflection that I found myself sending postcards to people held in Maghaberry and Portlaoise from a city where so many were mailed to me.

We had been forewarned in advance that Stockholm was an expensive city and it turned out to be just that. A pitcher of Margaritas to go along with our evening meal cost about €50. Everywhere, prices made rip off Ireland look cheap and value for money by comparison. A cold city, it had no Iceland mentality; nothing there to equal buy one get one free.

Stockholm is a very clean and tidy city and seemingly well organised. Trams, taxis, planes and buses all seem to be on time. Restaurants are invariably packed. Capital of what is said to be the most secular country in Europe, there were few churches that I saw. A religious bookshop beckoned but I didn’t enter. I already had my fiction for the journey, the third of the Stieg Larsson trilogy.

We called it our honeymoon, the first time we had actually got away together without kids tagging along and fighting every step of the way. Our last trip together sans what our friend Angela calls ‘the midgets’ was to Madrid. Even then one managed to stowaway in her mother’s womb. As much as we love them, we found that a touch of absence makes the heart grow fonder!

We spent a lot of time walking including a two hour Stieg Larsson tour. On foot is the best way to acquaint with a city. The late David Ervine preferred to holiday in cities rather than resorts. He wanted to see how people lived rather than how they holidayed. There is much to be said for that. The ersatz composition of resorts limits knowledge of a country visited. Once in from the cold streets of Stockholm, we would collapse in the warmth of a spacious and well maintained hotel room, grateful for the small mercy of not having to separate the fighting midgets.

We were hardly in the city 24 hours before we ran into a scam merchant. He was a taxi driver and seemed not to have been Swedish. Most Swedes we spoke to had reasonable English but this chancer hadn’t a word of it and relied on excitable gesticulations to make his point which was basically that I had broken something disembarking from his taxi. He most likely kept the broken piece in the cab and cellotaped it back on to catch the next tourist he thought was gullible enough to fall for his ruse. My wife sought to calm him with a larger than normal tip whereas I felt a hefty tip on the end of his nose more in order.

Con men like this weasel are regulars in many foreign cities. I experienced it in Amsterdam one evening when a taxi driver who claimed to hail from Morocco took myself and a former republican prison on an elongated route to our flat. When he asked for his ridiculously inflated fare my friend tossed the standard 15 guilders in his direction, telling him in no uncertain terms that we were onto his scam. He threatened us with the cops to which we invited him to take us to the station. A new departure in our lives but the cops were Dutch, not British. That ended the exchange.

Obviously I do not know the cultural or ethnic backgrounds of the people who traversed Stockholm’s streets but it seemed very much a white European city. It was certainly not Malmo to the South of the country where there is much social tension between many Swedes and the immigrant population and where more than a dozen foreign nationals have been shot there this year alone. Few people of different skin colour were on view in Stockholm, unlike Dublin, London or Amsterdam. The only two beggars I came across were not white and it struck me that immigrants, if that is what they were, might experience a difficult time in the country. If the food and drink prices were an index to go by, then it would take a considerable amount of hours on the streets, cup in hand, to make enough for a bed for the night. Ending up on the street is not a safe option. The Swedish climate is not one that would guarantee a response to a wake up call after a night spent roughing it.

Back home, and the kids are fighting.


Postcards from Stockholm

Now that the annual family holiday is over my wife and I can relax again! Kids take it out of you by the yard and a holiday is needed to get over a holiday. The flights might have been comfortable even if delayed, no real turbulence either going or leaving, but we had our own 5 year old Stuka dive bomber ready to strafe his nine year old sister at every opportunity, and on the flimsiest of pretexts. By the close of fourteen days holiday fatigue had well and truly set in and we were ready for Ireland in spite of its rain. When we left our old friend the drizzle waved us goodbye and when we returned it bade us hello. Like the proverbial bad penny you can always be sure of it turning up.

As has become the family custom we spent our fortnight sun siesta in the Majorcan resort of Palma Nova. However, I think we have come to the end of our love affair with it. We know it too well and while having enjoyed every minute spent there we are of a view that we have squeezed as much out of the place as we are likely to. If we go back we are likely to face the law of diminishing returns. As the old adage goes a change is as good as a rest. The children too are a bit restless with it and in need of fresh adventures.

Normally we go to another hotel but changed this time. It was a choice we did not regret. Our fellow guests were for the most part English, thoroughly pleasant and far removed from the lager louts that so many holiday makers dread running into.

My wife put the holiday operation together and as ever was meticulous in her planning. As usual a book by Antony Beevor made up part of my reading ensemble. He is now mandatory for holidays abroad and The Battle For Spain was atmospherically ideal for our location. My aim was to complete four books and I managed to finish the last one waiting in the hotel lobby for the bus to take us to Palma Airport. Cutting it fine but still within the set period. It hardly matters. Also conquered were the 570 pages of the second in a trilogy by the brilliant Stieg Larsson. For those not yet initiated it is not too late. The best in crime fiction I have read for years.

Kid watching – not in the priestly sense – is a tiring activity. With two of them in the pool and often wanting to be in separate but adjoining pools a parent needs eyes like a hawk. My wife told me just before we went out that most kids who drown in pools do so within 25 metres of their parents. Learning that does not produce an effect equivalent to Valium on the nerves. Then separating their fights while the more reserved English clientele looked on was hardly conducive to rest and relaxation.

I don’t take kindly to the sun. It led me to endlessly quaff pints of San Miguel and I can hardly feign the chutzpah to complain. A warm climate induces discomfort in me more easily than a cold one. Last Christmas here with its persistent snow was less challenging than two weeks of Majorcan sunshine. Yet, the pool and the sea compensate enormously. Sailing around the coves of the Mediterranean and leaping from a catamaran into the warm water with my daughter has provided a memory to be cherished.

And that’s what it is all about – memories of great times shared with those we love most. Although I did not come to appreciate this until late in life it causes me few regrets. In earlier years circumstance beckoned and I followed. I remain avowedly philosophical about that. But sitting in the Majorcan sun with my wife and children I knew that nothing now comes before them, neither cause nor campaign.


Now, back to the grind.

Majorcan Sun

Back home a week now, gazing out the living room window at the driving Irish rain I forlornly ponder that different worlds are separated by nothing other than 2 hours flight time. Last Sunday morning as I viewed the mizzle enveloping the street in front of me I was still trying to take it in that less than 48 hours earlier I had been swimming in the Mediterranean with my wife and two children. At such moments I recall Tommy Gorman’s summation of the Irish weather – summer is on a Thursday this year.

The Coast of Mallorca is an ideal spot for stepping into warm seas. 8 years ago in the same spot myself and Sav, a friend from Ballymurphy, were being plucked from the Med having failed to land in the designated area while paragliding. We were probably less than sober and indifferent to our bad directional skills. It was he who, in an act of good judgement, introduced me to Mallorca as a holiday destination. Then my wife was around four months pregnant with our daughter. Now to watch the same daughter followed by her younger brother leap into the sea is an experience to be savoured.

Initially booked into apartments in Santa Ponsa, we stayed six days before moving onto Palma Nova. Santa Ponsa is hilly. Its narrow footpaths coupled with the speed of the motorised vehicles keeps parents of younger children constantly on their guard. Where we stayed there was little in the way of shade and the English language seems to be the only officially approved tongue in the resort for holiday makers. The joy of swapping sandy beaches for our four green fields is instantly doused by the sense that there must be no one left back in Ireland. The population of 5 million seems to have been lifted en masse and crammed into Santa Ponsa. Even the Spanish waiters have managed to acquire Dublin accents, having become naturalised denizen of Bally Ponsa.

Not being a culture vulture I have no problems with English as a spoken language. I am a creature of convenience: common currency, common language, both a useful foil against the tourist’s nightmare – chaos. But on holiday it is more exotic to hear something other than Dublin or Belfast brogues. Palma Nova fitted the bill. My wife took a taxi up to check the place out before we decided on making the switch.

Before setting out she trawled the net in search of more information. The chief complaint seemed to come from English people who griped that the hotel we were considering moving to had too much shade around the pool. Moreover, the food was served up with a French palate in mind. And, of course, the place was overrun by French and German people. That pointed to one conclusion – all the more reason to go. When we arrived there was only one downside; the apartments across the street from our hotel housed the English and they were only too eager to announce their presence via bullhorn and tuneless football chants accompanied by idiotic roars. The only prompt they needed was an urge to be heard or noticed. Where we stayed, to the polite resonance of merci and bonjour, it was, as the French might say, ‘magnifique’.

We are hardly strangers to Spain, although we are more inclined to locations other than resorts. Children and resorts, however, seem to hit it off so with them in mind choice of location is restricted. Toward the close of 2000 my wife and I spent almost a week in Madrid. It was a beautiful city and by late October the sun god has reclined having sated itself on the burnt skin offerings proffered to it as obeisance during the summer months. Paradoxically, despite all that is said about its heat, Spain also provides me with a memory of my coldest experience. Zaragoza in November was so bitterly cold I kept asking my Spanish friend if he was sure it was part of the same country which housed Madrid and Segovia.

Still, the Spanish weather does not suit me. I don’t do that type of heat well. The humidity is the problem and it always seems to be invigorated rather than suppressed by the quaffing of beer. The weather in Ireland is more to my liking, even with its propensity for rain. When dry the Irish weather is unobtrusive, unlike Spain where its presence cannot be ignored. My daughter’s one complaint about Mallorca was simple – ‘too warm.’ My wife being from California had no bother with it.

Now back home, the place that only two weeks ago we were so eager to escape seems not just as drudging – even with its interminable rain.

Viva España