In the 1960s, my mother harboured dreams of travelling. Originally from a small, rainy town in Snowdonia, she longed for California, fantasising about exotic climes, white sand and turquoise seas. Instead, she became a primary-school teacher, got married and settled down to the hard slog of raising two children.
We managed a few holidays abroad before the family disintegrated into acrimonious divorce. There was a summer spent camping near La Rochelle, in France, a week in Minorca and a fortnight on the Croatian island of Hvar. But I always felt my mother’s dreams had never been fully realised. And that’s where I came in.
Over the past 13 years, I’ve traversed the globe: Tahiti, Costa Rica, Peru, Bali, New York, San Francisco and Morocco are just some of the places I’ve visited. But when you’re in your thirties, going on a holiday alone can be depressing, especially when the hotels are full of honeymooners. So, I hit on the ideal solution — take Mum. Fulfil her dreams and have a companion to boot. In the past few years, we’ve been to Paris, Puglia, Mexico and Ravello. This autumn, I’m taking her to Cornwall; in November, she’s coming to Thailand.
Our most recent escapade was the two-and-a-half-week driving tour of Scandinavia. We weren’t strictly alone: my mum’s partner, Neil, was to accompany us, drive the car, speak to the locals (he is a Swedish translator) and, perhaps most important, referee our arguments.
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Boy, can my mum be controlling. A friend of mine once described her as the most Jewish non-Jewish mother she had ever met. (This, after all, is the woman who decided to “foster” my cat Lenny because I was away too much.) As the trip unfolded, she scrutinised my alcohol intake like a hawk. More than one glass of wine, and I was accused of “alcohol issues”. And it wasn’t just the drinking. Everything was open to criticism. “If I were on your salary,” she told me, “I’d have paid off my mortgage by now.” She decreed that I was too old to visit Moominworld, in Finland. Probably true — I am 34 — but a devastating blow, as I’d been looking forward to it for months.
As we crossed the Baltic in a shared ship’s cabin, my mother watched to make sure I brushed my hair and teeth morning and night and chastised me for wearing clothes that were too creased or skirts that were too short. By the end of the holiday, she was monitoring how many times I was going to the lavatory each day. My patience was stretched to breaking point.
I, in turn, made a good job of winding her up. I told her I was planning a booze cruise to Calais to stock up on hundreds of bottles of wine. I told her I wanted a dog (“Don’t be so ridiculous,” she retaliated) and, to assert my status as a fully grown adult, a baby. The response — “It would be taken into care” — hardly came as a surprise. And then I dropped the bombshell: I was back with the boyfriend she did not like. “Is that for the other one?” she grumbled, unable to say his name, when I bought him a T-shirt in Marimekko.
And yet there are things about travelling with my mother that I love. She knows how to have a laugh, for one thing. As we wandered through Millesgarden, a beautiful sculpture garden in Stockholm, she let out a trumpeting fart that had us both dissolving into childish giggles; we spent the rest of the morning avoiding a man with long hair who’d been in the vicinity of her emission. “Look at the crack of that man’s arse!” she exclaimed, with a note of comic horror, pointing to a builder’s-bum overhang at a nearby table in the buffet on the ferry from Stockholm to Helsinki. Believe me, it was funny if you were there.
She’s also incredibly gregarious, where I can be shy and introverted. During lunch in Helsinki, she befriended a young Italian family, also on holiday. Before you could say “arrivederci”, my mother had extracted key information about their lives and travels — they were going to Tallinn and St Petersburg — and regaled them with tales of our little holiday in Puglia. On a Finnish pleasure cruiser, she engaged in a long discourse with an American woman who was teaching English as a foreign language to Russians. She charmed a Danish motel manager named Benny with her compliments on his freshly painted rooms.
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I like my mother’s ability to find loveliness in the simplest things. Even though I’ve taken her to some of the swishest hotels on earth — the Palazzo Sasso, in Ravello, the Beverly Hills, in LA — she is not spoilt. She cooed with delight at the underfloor heating in one spartan Danish hotel. She revelled in the mini-sauna attached to our apartment in Helsinki. Clean sheets, double glazing and fruits of the forest compote for breakfast all got her seal of approval.
I think it is probably because she was brought up in near-Victorian conditions: no hot running water, no cooker, no indoor toilet, even no glass in the windows at times. She deserves a bit of luxury, and I’m glad I can provide it. There are highs and there are lows, but I don’t regret a minute of our holidays together. I want to sweep her off her feet before she gets too old. Cornwall and Thailand later this year? Bring it on!