Holiday

Funny, I read somewhere the other day that apparantly, summer family holidays are the most stressful time of the year for familes. Everyone else must be doing something badly wrong then, because the week I spent with my family in Devon at the end of June was a lovely experiance that was just the tonic after the most tense and stressful exams I've ever had to face. It couldn't have been timed better, either - my last exam was the day before I left! Perfect :)

It was a funny holiday, as there was none of that settling in one usually has when arriving at somewhere new, for the simple reason that we'd stayed at the exact same cottage this time last year! The only difference this year was that, having arrived a few weeks later than the previous year, we enjoyed much better weather - the South West is known for having slightly, erm, 'erratic' weather shall we say. But a Thursday of unremitting drizzle aside, it was pleasant - warm and sunny, but just enough cloud and breeze to keep things at a nice level.

The cottage is positioned in the tiny town of Chillaton, in the middle of the rolling hills and fields of the countryside, and it had the owners of the place living right next door. Now normally, that has been a recipe for disaster in previous experiance, but the owners, an elderly couple by the name of Ann and Ted, were good as gold to us throughout, and made us feel right at home without being overly intrusive. They went about their business (usually gardening or looking after their pets, Murphy the dog and Torty the tortoise) and left us to enjoy the place in peace.

Now, while my parents eagerly devoured up the Moors and other locations, I was happy to find a quiet field near the house and lay in the sunshine, either listening to music (nearly always Red Hot Chili Peppers), reading poetry or writing my own stuff. You wont believe how relaxing it can be, just to have the breeze stroking your face, swifts fluttering around you, and a herd of cows just gazing over the fence into the adjoining field at you as you lay in the grass! I got endless inspiration from it, and from the view I had - I'll make sure to show you the photos I got of the landscape from my phone. If it wasn't that, it was sitting around in the barn converted into a games room, playing pool, or just listening to music and watching World Cup football on the tiny telly in the corner.

The evenings were similar - my mum understandably took the line that, as she cooks for us nearly every day for the rest of the year, she was going to refuse to cook at all on holiday, so every night we either ordered a takeaway from one of the excellant restaurants or chip shops in Tavistock, or went out to dinner at any of the many local pubs in the area. A pint or two and some fish and chips later (For me anyway :P), we'd head for home, and with some cold cider, we'd stick on a compilation CD (anything from a ska mixtape to the Rolling Stones to The Beach Boys to the Blues Brothers) and play several games of pool. We even had a friend with us for the matches - there was a large spider's web at one end of the barn in the roofing, and every night when we went to play pool, the spider it belonged to would come out and sit in the middle of his web, as if he were watching us play. We even nicknamed him Spider Virgo, after the esteemed snooker commentator John Virgo :)
















The only downsides I can think of about the experiance was perhaps the fact that I missed my school's sixth form Prom night, but then again, it was doubtful I would have gone to it anyway - people who know me will know that I'm not a massive party-goer, and that coupled with the fact that I can somehow 'dad-dance' worse than my own dad, means that it wasn't much of a hardship to spend the Prom evening drinking beer in a country pub :)

The only other downside was the slightly depressing feeling that I felt so much more at home there - the people there were friendly and amicable. I'm using to wandering around my home town and seeing teenage mums pushing prams with a fag in the other hand, 16-year-old girls with beer bellies and a nose piercing, and testorsterone blokes in Saxoes - all the sort of people that, when you look at them, shoot you a "what the fuck you lookin' at?" type glare back.

I didn't see ANY of the above down in Devon.

Not one.

It was so unbelievably refreshing. Bad mobile phone signal? Who cares, just go up and talk to somebody face to face! It was that sort of place. If a native of Devon knows otherwise, please let me know, but otherwise, I'm sticking with my impression of Devon as a thoroughly nice and pleasant part of the world.

Same time next year? I think so :D In the meantime, I've already been posting up stuff I wrote on holiday, and will continue to do so in the coming days :)