Five things that always happen when you go on holiday with your grandparents
Last week National Express claimed bookings from those aged 65 and over had increased by 101% thanks to the vaccine. Jit Desai, head of holidays and travel at the venerable coach company, stated that last Monday it took the same number of reservations in a day as it would normally take in a week.
It looks increasingly likely, when it comes to UK holidays at least, that the older generation is going to be doing plenty of travelling this summer. So perhaps 2021 could be a year for inter-generational breaks?
For me, it all brings back recollections of taking all-inclusive coach trips around the UK in the 1980s with my grandparents (supplemented with more recent memories of group coach trips taken by myself, in the name of travel journalism, where I was the only person on board not old enough to remember the moon landings).
I recall rather enjoying travelling with my grandparents, based in no small part on my granny’s insistence on always having a small confectioner’s amount of boiled sweets about her person and my grandad’s laxity when it came to compelling me to ever eat anything green or healthy.
So if you do end up swapping Benidorm for a coach holiday to Broadstairs this summer, here’s five things you should prepare yourself for.
Questionable set menus
A large number of restaurants in the UK possess a chef that has a complete nervous breakdown at the prospect of catering a la carte to more than 14 people at the same time. The solution is the coach party set menu lunch. This will be served by a terrified troop of minimum wage 16-year-old school leavers in an annex of a pub on the side of an A road which has more fruit machines than customers the rest of the time.
The menu will be a chilled-to-the-bone rectangle of pate followed by overcooked chicken, and always concludes with Nescafe and a bowl of ice cream with sliced banana. Complaints will be perfectly timed to begin the moment the last member of the party has left the restaurant and is safely back on the coach. In blissful ignorance of his culinary crimes, the chef will conclude he’s done another fantastic job and the school leavers will spend the rest of the afternoon dreaming of getting a gig in Subway.
Very extended toilet stops
A necessary interlude if you’re burdened with colostomy bags, wheelchairs or walking sticks, but somewhat dull for younger members of the party. During these interminable breaks at motorway service stations across the UK, it can become necessary to conjure up alternative forms of entertainment to see out the solid 40 minutes it can take two dozen pensioners to perform basic bodily functions.
Take your pick from counting the pigeons pecking around the bin outside KFC, retire to the in-house WH Smith to ponder why food and drink costs so much more beside the motorway, or simply enjoy watching a lorry driver hit the side of the one armed bandit in the ‘arcade’ as it swallows the £2 coin he needed for the toll bridge up the road.
A tour guide with a poor sense of humour
Ricky Gervais, Bill Bailey, Amy Schumer, Larry David... your on-board tour guide has not heard of any of these great comedians. Instead, his repertoire seems to have been mostly taken from the intro monologues that Bob Monkhouse used to perform on ‘Bob’s Full House’.
In between bouts of ‘historical knowledge’ on the upcoming attraction we’ll be stopping off to see (all gleamed from a fact sheet he memorised in 1989) we can expect quality badinage which will involve the onset of rain being met with the quip that it’s ‘nice weather for ducks, as they say!’ and the Blackpool Tower will be described (to a quite incredibly tolerant audience; tolerant perhaps because they know they can’t escape and only the driver has the power to open the coach door) as a ‘bit of an eye-full... geddit?’
Obligatory postcard buying
There are, of course, a raft of silver surfers with top of the range iPads out there, who are in constant touch with the family throughout their trip (whether the family want it or not). But there’s an enduring commitment to the age old habit of sending a postcard from a souvenir shop/petrol station/farm shop on the outskirts of Hastings or Stow on the Wold with tensions noticeably rising on board if a postcard stop off isn’t factored into the schedule.
What won’t surprise you is that the quality of images on postcards hasn’t improved one iota since the days of receiving one with a picture of a half built hotel next to a ring road from your Uncle Brian back in the 1980s. What will shock you is how much people are prepared to pay for such a thing. The era of the £1 postcard in some parts of Britain is now sadly with us.
A quite astonishing amount of drinking
It’s an absolute myth that once your grandparents get into their 70s their drinking tolerance retracts to being able to handle little more than a shandy beer at lunch and a dry sherry after dinner. This is a mere front that is put on to benefit the extended family on Christmas Day. Go on holiday with your grandparents and the scenario is very different.
Hip flasks are often lovingly concealed inside casual sportswear. Calls for a gin and tonic at 1130am are as insistent as they are loud. And, in the ‘residents lounge’, after dinner at the hotel, it takes nothing more than the barman putting on an Abba number to get pensioners necking tots of rum and ginger and dancing until, inevitably, somebody pulls a back muscle and has to get carried up to their room on a plank.
