Coach holidays - the Knowledge

In our household we try to do a couple of coach trips a year. We do self-catering as well, and sometimes we even Go Abroad, but we like coach trips best because they are so educational. 

The last trip was even more educational than usual. At the end of the holiday, before being allowed out of your hotel and while Reception is discreetly checking that you have remembered to pay your colossal bar bill, you have to hand in a completed report form on which you have ticked little boxes in answer to questions such as “Did you find the facilities in your room...excellent?...brilliant?...fantastic?”

We’re not very good at ticking little boxes, which might be why we didn’t make it to university. We prefer narrative reports. So this is what we learned on our last Educational Coach Holiday.

1) the most interesting people are always on the other coach (your coach is full of [see Appendix A])

1a) and you only meet at breakfast and dinner, when you enjoy the maitre d’s special entertainment, sliding the poached egg into the lady’s lap, and

1b) not tasting the wines that have just been run out of.

2) All coach trips, whatever their destination (Braemar, Polperro, Scarborough, the Scilly Isles, Llandudno) always have a visit to a shop that turns heather into feather boas or old flagstones into spectacular swimwear. It is a little-known fact that these shops are actually owned by the coach companies, who have cunningly established them at points exactly halfway between any two holiday destinations, thus giving honest employment to starving people who would otherwise have to become hotel entertainers rather than attempt to scrape a bare living from the stony soil of Glen47milesfromanywhereelse.

3) People who travel on coach trips are deemed to be addicted to a) bingo and b) country & western music, and hotels are obliged to provide both or the coach company won’t use them. The intellectual effort required of participants in a) is exhausting, so an entertainer is always on hand to provide b) until well after closing time. And as people who travel on coach trips are also deemed to be stone-deaf, the entertainment is provided at colossal volume and can be clearly heard several streets away. Indeed, some travellers, denied the solace of sleep because the noise keeps making the wardrobe fall over, take rugs and a thermos flask and camp out several streets away (this does not work in Torquay, of course, because the noise from the entertainment in the hotel several streets away is far, far worse.)

Appendix A

i)  crisp-eaters. The first indication of the presence of a crisp-eater is a rustling sound. Slumbering heaps stir uneasily. Then the pure recirculating air of the coach is invigorated by the initial bag-opening aroma of sweaty socks, followed immediately by an assortment of ponging vapours; of salt and vinegar; prawn cocktail; cheese and onion; sea-salt and mangold-wurzel; goat and cranberry; and dead dog and lavatory cleaner. The second indication, assaulting the ears instead of the olfactory organs, is a sound rather like that of an ice-breaker working its methodical way through a Norwegian fjord in January. At this point the entire coach is awake.

ii) coughers, sneezers and snufflers, working on the principle that a filthy cold shared is a filthy cold halved, or better. ‘You need a holiday’, the doctor said. ‘A change of air will do you the world of good.’ And keep me and my colleagues in business, he mutters under his breath. In the good old days he would have recommended a walk to the end of the pier. And then, similarly sotto voce, jump off.

iii) people who have paid extra for the front seats, the ones with a view of the windscreen wipers or the driver’s sunblind, and insist that their right of occupancy extends to the feeder coaches and the optional tours. This is why you will often see a coach with 16 or 17 people stubbornly occupying the front seats and refusing to budge, even for a comfort stop. Some coaches are provided with a side door to allow the rest of the passengers to disembark without being suspected of waiting to pounce on a potentially vacated front seat and thus risking ritual disembowelling.

iv) people whose wet coats smell of dog

v) hotties and coldies. In general it is hotter at the back of the coach than at the front, where the door is. When the coach is stationary, as it often is for a couple of hours at roadworks, internal temperatures equalise, but the moment the coach starts again all the hot air rushes to the back. And whatever the inside temperature is, it is always a) too hot and b) too cold. Lively discussions ensue when some brave soul asks for the heating to be turned up/down.

Next holiday we’re going to stay at home, play country & western music very loud and lob poached eggs into each other’s lap. Apart from the washing-up it’ll be as good as a coach trip, and a lot less expensive.