Holiday watch

Having finally got a 3G signal last night I ventured a look at Grany Buttons, who weeks ago responded to my Napton celeb-sighting:

If he's 'not in Heat magazine', he probably wasn't hugely famous - certainly not an A-lister.
Perhaps he has a blog and was famous to Sarah and me and thirteen others.

Well, Andrew, he was a bit more famous than that. Not being in Heat (not that I have ever opened its pages) was a reference to the quality rather than the quantity of his celebrity. I may have a funny idea, of course, of what constitutes mentionworthiness, but this was someone whom I was surprised to see without an armed bodyguard, which is why I didn't like to mention it straight away.... It was David Trimble. There now, that is pretty impressive, isn't it. Real ale adviser to one of the brokers of peace in Northern Ireland. (I don't think he had any though.)

I was idly musing earlier whilst chucking bread to a female widgeon (I looked her up in my Observers Book of Birds) on the nature of this holiday qua holiday. Holidays are meant to be relaxing, healthy, restorative.... My idea of a holiday is something more stressful than anything I do the rest of the year; long stretches of boredom punctuated with moments of sheer terror; confined in a space that if the CIA were doing it would probably breach the Geneva Convention, with husband who with the best will in the world can be trying, and teenage son; subsisting on tins and packets and chips and too much meat, fresh vegetables but a distant memory; too much alcohol (mind you, that is a positive); breathing diesel fumes all day long, constantly cold and wet, and with the every present opportunity of sustaining a really serious physical injury - no wonder we love it.