Great escapes: where I go when it’s all too much

So I shut my eyes. Even though I felt stressed and afraid, I knew I had to relax. I took deep breaths and I tried to think of something calm and serene. I took myself to a desert island-style beach: blue skies, palm trees, the kind of holiday-brochure place you’re supposed to go when you meditate. It didn’t work. It felt like landscape porn. I have no relationship with such beaches. So I tried my adored Suffolk coastline. Vast grey skies, grey choppy sea, a sense of infinity, which always brings death to mind. Not good for my heartbeat. I came back with a bump.

I tried thinking of my kids. Which made me feel happy and warm, yes, but not calm. In the end, I was surprised by the two things that worked.

One: I am lying pinned to a bed by a cat, which is on my stomach, purring gently. Now I swear I’m not one of those mad cat-ladies — give me people over animals any day — but you try remaining tense when the family tabby has decided to lie on you. Your limbs get heavy, you submit. Cats settle you. They don’t take no for an answer. I conjured this picture and I felt warm, I felt still. My heartbeat began to slow.

Two: my childhood bed. Or one particular view of the sheet. Striped pale pink, lavender, yellow, blue (didn’t all we 1960s children have these sheets?), slightly furred from many washes, tucked tightly around my shoulder. A child’s-eye view of these sheets brings thermometers and penicillin to mind, long days of watching the sun move around the room, of knowing you were looked after, safe. This, too, brought down my heartbeat.

The men in white coats came and discharged me. I was pronounced fit, if tense. So began a long struggle to relax. But I discovered something interesting on that bed in casualty. For me, escape is not to a place but a feeling. It’s not about beauty but safety. It’s not about choice but about no choice. The tabby cat pins you down, the childhood bed sheets are tightly tucked. You’re not going anywhere.

Your heartbeat plummets and you are calm.

HANNAH BETTS

Times journalist

Perhaps my escape is too obvious — too mainstream a refuge — but there are times when nothing, but nothing, is as real and restorative as fiction.

Conventional modes of retreat do nothing for me. I find relaxing stressful, care little for nature, have no god and, gregarious as I can make myself, must balance bouts of socialising with bookish seclusion. Reading is life’s consummate pleasure. But there are occasions when it is a breathe-into-a-paper-bag necessity: commutes when I can’t stomach a newspaper; weekends when I am sick and tired of everyone and everything. Times when I need to be “in my head” but, finding my head an over-wrought and over-stuffed thing, prefer to seek solace in someone else’s.

Some of my forays I would class as comfort reading, be it Dodie Smith or Henry James. But the crux of literature’s capacity as refuge is not merely comfort but the audacity of its escapism.

In the same way that some dreams become as memorable as actual events, so I recall Atwood’s wildernesses, Dickens’s tragi-comedians and Spenser’s Bower of Bliss with the force of “real” memory. Doubtless this is why travel invariably leaves me cold: I’ve been to better places.

SIMON BARNES

Times Chief Sports Writer

I have an escape that is fast, dangerous and unpredictable. It requires hard work and it consumes a fair amount of money. I don’t seek this for therapeutic reasons: therapy is an incidental benefit. I do it because living any other way is unthinkable. I live with horses.

There are four of them at home now. I ride two and do the feeding and mucking out for the lot. Nor do I do these humdrum tasks to be able to ride, any more than you get married to have sex. I have horses, I ride horses, I care for horses because . . . Well, because it’s what I do.

Part of the attraction is in contrast. A writer spends a lot of time inside his own head: with horses, if you are not concentrating on externals, you are going to get hurt. But it is not the whole story.

With horses, I’m not escaping from the pressure of work. It’s much better than that: I am escaping from the pressure of being human. I am seeking an understanding with a big non-human creature. Call it an experiment in communication. To take part, I need to take myself beyond the human condition: and I am enthralled. This is also the incidental therapy.

That moment when your nerve and timing are right and the young horse grows in confidence beneath you. Or when you start the morning tasks with the horses grazing in the field, giving the whole world a feeling of content; or after the mucking-out has been done and you lead the eager beasts in for the evening feed; or when, last thing at night, I check the boxes, my torch unlit, seeing nothing, hearing only the sound of the munching of hay and feeling, perhaps, the touch of a soft nose as I pass.

Horses are my escape: and more than an escape. They are oxygen.

DAVID AARONOVITCH

Times writer

I am a columnist and columnists don’t need to get away from it all because we spend most of our lives away from it all. What we need, shut up all that time with ourselves, is to get back to it all. But to do this too abruptly is a shock to the system. I’m able to cope with about three hours at the office before I think that people are beginning to hate me, and other columnists I have spoken to feel the same way. The question is how to manage re-entry.

We need pleasant halfway houses populated by people and conversations that are stimulating, convivial and supportive, without anybody putting us on the spot or asking us to do anything.

Here’s mine: three times a week, at 8.30am, I go to the orange-coloured Giraffe coffee shop in the high street and meet up with my friends, John the writer and Steve the shrink. There we eat porridge, talk about the day’s news, or Freud, or the playwright Clifford Odets, or advise each other about how to handle the angry wife or the recalcitrant child.

And then I’m ready.

KATHY LETTE

Novelist

Of course, my favourite escape would be lying naked ‘neath a tropical palm, while Johnny Depp licked the roe of virgin sturgeons from my navel . . . but if I couldn’t have that, then it’d be Selfridges.

The good thing about being a woman is that no matter how bad things get we can always go shopping. Armani who art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy name.

I once read an article that said that typical symptoms of stress are eating too much, impulse buying and driving too fast. Are they kidding? That’s my idea of a divine day. Is there anything better than losing yourself in rack- pawing, sales delirium and guiltless gimme-gimme while gossiping with girlfriends about each other’s marriages — namely why the secret of a happy marriage is such a well-kept bloody secret. And how we’d never get married again . . . although an aged billionarie with a great art collection who is really quite ill could hold some appeal. How we cackle. How we roar. We have to be hospitalised from hilarity.

I know that men would rather listen to a Yoko Ono CD than go shopping. But it has been scientifically proven that no woman can walk past a shoe shop that is having a sale and not go in. It’s the greatest difference between the sexes. Besides the fact that we’re so superior. (Why do men like intelligent women? Because opposites attract.) To top off our perfect afternoon, it’s champagne cocktails in the bar, then home to complain to your long-suffering bloke that you didn’t want to go shopping — but the others made you.

Kathy Lette’s latest novel is How to Kill Your Husband (and Other Handy Household Hints), Simon & Schuster, £7.50

BEATING A RETREAT

One person’s refuge is another one’s Hell. PHILLIP HODSON examines the psychology of getting away from it all

The film star Greta Garbo famously wanted to be alone. Others take a weekend break at a Travel Lodge. A sanctuary is a place of physical, emotional or spiritual refuge where we go to feel safe from our personal demons and predators.

According to biologists, every creature needs to alternate between tension and relaxation if it is to thrive or, indeed, to survive. We are alarmingly bad at avoiding killer stress in general but curiously good at regulating one of its big components — toxic exposure to the demands of others — and we quickly resort to finding a bolt hole.

For some, retreat is into the mind, not an actual hotel, shed or cave. SAS soldiers, for instance, are trained by psychologists to withdraw into that small safe room in the middle of the skull in case of capture by the enemy and torture.

But not everyone finds respite in the act of withdrawal. A psychological exercise from the 1980s showed that the country is more or less evenly divided into those for whom “Hell is oneself” as against those for whom “Hell is other people”. This reflects experience: we’ve all met individuals who seem to die a little when they are on their own as opposed to those who suddenly come back to life.

At the same time, not all escapes are consciously chosen or even particularly good for us. Some patients discover a “negative escape”, so to speak, when exhibiting a variety of neurotic behaviour from self-harming to gambling to driving too fast up the M4.

Karl Marx once said: “The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.” But I think we could nearly all benefit from having an absorbing hobby. Yes, the Foreign Secretary has her caravan and John Prescott plays croquet. Even Ken Livingstone chats to newts. I say beware the man of power with no obvious hinterland; I worry about Gordon Brown.

Phillip Hodson is a Fellow of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (www.bacp.co.uk)