Am using the free wifi and sofas in Guernsey’s Tourist Information Centre, where the staff are very nice indeed, while waiting for the ferry to Sark.
Another impulsive mini-holiday made in a moment of desperately wanting to get away and go somewhere, coupled with paint fumes from the flat downstairs’s major redecorating stint forcing me out – anywhere. Plus the night shift really got to me last week – not quite breaking down in tears before my colleagues, but the closest I’ve come yet. I need… something. Somewhere quiet. Without paint fumes. Or indeed, traffic fumes. Sark has a ban on cars – it’s all horsedrawn carriages and hired bicycles.
I’m also off to Gibraltar and Tangier two weeks later – booked months ago. So after that my wallet will need a holiday too. I’ll be pretty much grounded for the summer, fumes or no fumes. But it’s utterly worth it.
What I don’t want to happen is to turn into one of those people who work, then feel the need to blow all their wages on doing things that take their mind off the work. I took the night shift job partly to earn money while getting plenty of time off, but also to get me out of my spiralling nihilism and slapping me about the face with a dose of the real world. Maybe I’m still in shock from the slaps.
If I were back on the dole, chances are I’d be just as miserable and frustrated, except it’d be worse: miserable and frustrated AND penniless. Instead, here I am travelling to places I’d always dreamed of visiting if only I had a little cash.
Been meaning to go to Sark for 20 years, ever since I saw the 80s TV dramatisation of Mervyn Peake’s Mr Pye, starring Derek Jacobi as the alternately angel-winged and devil-horned protagonist . Though it may be only me that remembers it. A distinctly eccentric tale, set on a distinctly eccentric island.
Tags: impulsive holiday madness, Mr Pye, sark
