Trust Me
Planning a trip after the vernal equinox?
Trust me, I’ve been thereZoe Williams
IT’S really no mystery at all, why a person
might forget about Easter. Christmas,
Valentine’s Day, birthdays, your anniversary, your
“shag-iversary”, every conceivable date when you
might be able to whine your way to a mini-break
occurs at a fixed time of year. Easter, as we all
know, occurs on the first Sunday after the first full
moon after the vernal equinox, so it’s obvious —
except that nobody knows what a vernal equinox
is. I tell a lie, some people must know, otherwise
how would everything come to be booked out by
the Friday before?
Every single second-best, bargain-basementbut-
not-actually-that-cheap, what-did-I-comehere-
for? travel experience I’ve ever had has
occurred around this time. The
year I went to Tallinn, it was because I
wanted to go to Prague, only
the whole of the Czech Republic was booked
out. “Czech is chocka,” said the travel guy, which
delighted him so much that he couldn’t have been
more pleased at the ruination of my holiday. In
his ideal world, my relationship would spoil also,
and then he’d have got some duff wordplay out of
that. Naturally, all the destination-hotels in Tallinn
had been booked by the people who had wanted
to go there in the first place, so we ended up in a
business hotel, overlooking a conference centre,
for the kind of money that only a multi-national
company would ever think of paying, only without
a mini-bar — or for that matter a maxi-bar, in case
anyone should be driven to hard liquor.
The year I went to North Wales, it was because I wanted to go to the cutest hotel ever, called the Felin Fach in the Brecon Beacons, only — in fairness to me — this had been booked out since before anyone had even calculated the vernal equinox. North Wales, it turned out, is a lot further from my house than the Brecon Beacons. We arrived at 9pm, and were astonished to find that, late as we were, it was still the 1980s, and dinner was over. And this is how we reached the following evening without realising that there was no talking, or indeed noise of any sort, allowed in the dining room. So not only had we to eat 1980s food in total silence, I also couldn’t go to the loo the whole night because my shoes clacked. The year I wanted to go to New York, I ended up in Rochester, NY, and it would take years to go into the full horror of that. The year I fancied Bordeaux, I ended up in Metz, which is a bit like meaning to go to the Lake District and fetching up in Leighton Buzzard.
