Mama Mia

Sorry about the missing blog last week but I’ve just got back from a week long trip with my bucket and spade to the seaside in Portugal. The weather there was magnificent; in fact I lay awake marvelling at the magnificent lightning, listening to the magnificent thunder and watching the magnificent, teeming, rain only this morning before I left.

Portugal, or more specifically The Algarve, seems to be where British golfers, with more money than sense, selflessly go to give their friends and partners a break. It’s a kind of care home for the terminally nylon waterproofed which gives their golf widows temporary respite from embarrassment and the chance to enjoy life back home.

Every Winter and Spring, the airport at Faro gets filled with middle aged men watching their golf clubs go round on carousels while discussing the merits of tartan socks and Pringle jumpers in neon colours. Here in the UK, sadly, they’d be laughed at but in the Algarve, a bit like lady boys in a Thailand dance club, they can all congregate for mutual support and to share stories.

I love sport, and I’ve played rugby, football and tennis with various degrees of failure and an extraordinary lack of success. But golf has escaped me and, after a lot of thought, I think I know why. It’s because it’s not really a sport, is it?

Fat men with shoes that resemble gangster’s spats left over from the Valentine’s Day Massacre perspire as they push themselves out of a seat on a motorised buggy, remove the woollen pom pom covers that were “hand” knitted by large machines in the Third World and bought as a Christmas present for their clubs, and then hack the fairway to death before jumping back aboard and repairing to the “Ninenteenth” hole for a lager shandy and discussion of their latest cholesterol level checks. It’s not quite up there with Sir Chris Hoy and his miles of cycling each day while dragging Ben Nevis behind for resistance work is it?

But, as a round of golf in the Algarve can cost around a hundred pounds, the locals stifle their laughter and welcome the thousands of Euros that these weekend walkers and wide waisted wastrels bring in hotel fees, refusing to sneer at the procession of pink sweatered dodgy salesmen showing their passports to the girls at check in and quipping “my ‘phone number’s on there too”. My how we all laughed in the Easyjet queue each time we heard it, over and over, and over.

This week, then, you won’t be surprised to learn I didn’t go to Portugal for the golf but, instead, I went for a holiday, to do some business, and also to take my mum and dad for a well earned break.

My mum is someone everyone should take on holiday because she guarantees a laugh in restaurants, or just about anywhere really. She’ll turn down the waiters’ offers of fresh fish as she doesn’t like the bones, shellfish is a non starter as she’s scared of food poisoning, steak is out as she says she can’t chew it if it’s tough, and spaghetti stays on the starting blocks as it makes a mess. “So, what would you like then?”, the waiters will say in exasperation. “Oh,” my Mum will reply with a smile, “I’m not fussy, I’ll eat anything”.

She has a habit of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time which surprised a very kind waiter this trip who said, in a broken accent, not to hesitate and to ask him anything at all as he’d lived in Britain for a while and was proud to say his English was very good. As he turned round my mum said, very loudly, “What did he say? I couldn’t understand a word.”

In fairness, this may have something to do with the fact she wears a hearing aid and it may also have something to do with the fact that she’d worn it in the shower before coming out. “It’s not working now”, she said. “Full of water”. I asked for a look and discovered the real reason. She had forgotten to turn it on.

Mum has an affinity with toilets and will always have a holiday adventure connected with porcelain. A few years ago, on a trip to Italy with my Dad, she disappeared for ages to the ladies’ toilet leaving him to get more and more anxious as the minutes ticked away. When he eventually set off in search of her, my mum was laughing her head off. She’d desperately gone to the loo and, after the initial relief, had panicked as she realised she’d rushed without checking if the lid was up. It wasn’t!

On this trip, as we settled in to a cosy café after a long walk, she disappeared to the toilets for some considerable time and, as my dad and I speculated on whether she’d repeated the Italian trick, she arrived back saying she’d had a shock. A man had come in to the ladies toilet. When we discovered that she’d gone to the gents by mistake, she admitted she thought it was a bit different from usual and had wondered about the large wash hand basin on the wall and why she couldn’t get the water to run. That, we explained, was a urinal.

Now it’s back to reality with a week’s worth of bills and other post piled up, including various holiday brochures and special offers. There’s even one advertising a golfing holiday to Spain. If you’re going on that one then don’t bother to ask if I’m free to join you. But my mum, on the other hand, is always up for a holiday.