Caves, limoncello and folk dancing: Seven terrible decisions we only make on holiday
You’re on holiday. Your defences and standards are down. Thus, in the name of entertainment, are you prey to Sardinian folk troupes, museums of latticework and alcoholic drinks which turn out blue.
You’d never fall for these at home. If your wife suggested you go to a local art gallery show by Slovenian minimalists, you’d assume she’d been replaced by someone exactly like her, but insane. Holidays are different. There’s empty time to fill. You persuade yourself it’s fun. Or at least interesting. It isn’t.
There are many other things we do on holiday because they’re fun and interesting when they aren’t. I’ve experienced most of them.
1. Museums
I don’t mean real museums, like the Prado or the (now closed, much-missed) Musée de l’Erotisme in Paris.
I mean the small-town weird ones. My nadir was the Museum of Doors in Pézenas, Languedoc. We visited the ground floor. It was full of doors. My friend George went upstairs. “Anything up there?” I shouted. “Yes,” he cried. “Doors.” Pézenas may be in line for some kind of award: its automated, animated evocation of Molière, a frequent visitor to the town, would be rewarding only if nuclear war had knocked out every other tourist attraction in France.
2. Folk dancing
Lord knows, we’ve had ample warnings, but we still fall for it. I do. I’ve recently witnessed Catalans dancing their sardana, and Normans – with, breeches, bonnets and billowing skirts – doing whatever their dances are called. And yet we know: folk dances are indistinguishable. Women hold their aprons, men hold their hats, then they hold hands to move in circles, very slowly. Only the Totonac Voladores of Mexico do it for me. They climb a 100ft pole, attach a rope to their ankles and chuck themselves off, circling to the ground. I need to see that in Normandy.
3. Caves
With paintings in, brilliant. You can’t keep me out. I’m rarely more excited than when viewing aurochs, bison and horses from 25,000 years ago. But why would you enter a cave with no decoration? It’s like paying to walk along a corridor. And no stalagmite formation ever really looks like The Virgin and Child.
4. Local food
Oh dear. We want to go local, we say. It’s part of being away. Thus we end up eating testicles of squid or a sandwich of boiled calf’s lung (order the vastedda in Palermo) and longing for a proper restaurant with photographs on the menu. The low point of my dining life was at the foot of a pyramid in Central America. A street-food stand was selling fried grasshoppers. Also some sauce. My companion ordered the grasshoppers. They tasted, he said, much as you’d expect fried grasshoppers to taste. Kind of spindly and disgusting. Playing safe, I ordered a tub of the sauce. “What’s in it?”
I asked the stallholder, as I swallowed. “Ground-up grasshoppers,” he said. There is no shame in burgers.
5. Limoncello
Seems pleasing enough when the restaurant owner in Sorrento brings you a free one post-pudding, but – like wild black juniper liqueur, gentiane d’Auvergne, crème of blueberries, absinthe, sloe-and-angelica gin and truffle-flavoured wine, all present in my drinks cabinet for the past 45 years or so – the excitement doesn’t accompany it home.
22 more things you only do on holiday
6. Canal boating
Over a few days, or a week, canal cruising is fine. You have a cabin and time to adjust to the medieval pace. By contrast, day trips usher you through an absolutely unchanging landscape at Zimmer-frame speeds – couples on the bank fall in love, marry and divorce, before you’ve chugged out of sight. The whole is a foretaste of the silent wastelands of dementia. And mutiny’s out of the question because canals are narrow. You put the captain ashore and he’ll jump right back on board again.
7. Carnivals
A pain, if truth be told. Rio, Venice, Nice and the rest look OK in 90-second clips, but in the flesh they are city-wide, days-long fancy-dress parties. And we all know how desperate fancy-dress parties are. Plus you’re a spectator, not a participant. That’s more desperate yet. If you insist, try Dunkirk where, if memory serves, they dress up as 18th-century herrings and hit each other with sacks full of seafood.