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Last full day of the holiday and I need another holiday to get over this one. You can’t take a holiday from being a parent, you know, unless you’re one of those pricks who just fucks off (no offence if you are one of those pricks, you prick). I have had fun hanging around with my tiny idiots and it’s exactly what I wanted when I was away, but it’s taken it out of me. And I had to have a sleep this afternoon as other family members took on the responsibility of caring for our charming infants. It was a shame to lose a chunk of the last full day of the holiday, but I don’t need to tell you how much I like sleeping.
It’s been quite a relaxed week, but it’s flown by with one day melding into another in my brain so it’s been hard to recall what events happened when. We have been staying in self-catering apartments which belong to a nice hotel near the sea, which has worked brilliantly for us, as we’ve got to enjoy all the facilities at the hotel without having to spend a fortune.
The hotel and the rooms are decorated with some stock photos that of women from the 1950s (I’d guess) enjoying themselves on a beach somewhere. The same ones are repeated everywhere. The one in our lounge has four young women in bathing suits, standing on beach buoys (I think) and smiling. There was some debate as to whether this photo was an original or mocked up to look period, but I am pretty sure it’s an old one. The clothes and make-up are too authentic and I am sure that the hotel has found a cheap way to decorate their walls in a sort of a classy way, by buying up the image from an agency for not much (or maybe nothing), so I can’t see anyone spending thousands of pounds on a photo session and all the necessary preparation.
I suspect that the intention is to show people having fun on the beach in the hope that that will encourage you to do the same, or at least feel happy to be at the sea-side, but it doesn’t do that for me.
Firstly the expressions of the four women are all subtly different and certainly the two at the front of this prototype Human Centipede do not look genuinely happy and even possibly troubled. You start to notice this when you see the same photo every day. But secondly every time I look at the young people (ostensibly) having fun five or six decades ago, I just think of the transitory nature of time and how these four are now either very old and not as happy or as dead as Dirty Den. So it just makes me feel sad. Why can’t they be young and happy forever? Or at least why could their young happiness not have been captured on film to taunt them now? And if these young women can grow old then that means that one day, I too will not be young and carefree.
If you’re out there ladies then do get in touch and let me know how you are. I’d love to know how you ended up on those buoys.
