Slow Life | 16 May 2009

If there’s one thing that’s nicer than going on holiday, it’s getting home again. Particularly this time: the whole week we spent away, I was excited about coming home. It was a great holiday, soft splashing waves, sunshine and unfamiliar cheeses: the whole Bounty bar paradise package. I couldn’t have asked for more, but I’d arranged for the tent to go up in the garden at home while we were away, a surprise for the children. For nights I lay awake in my air-conditioned, five-star, fully serviced, grace-and-favour villa longing for that lovely old tent, turning it over and over in my mind as I dropped off. I got quite despondent two days before our return when I called the parish for a news update and heard it was raining: raining, windy and horrible. Brainwashed by cloudless Mediterranean skies my elaborately formed picture of a canvas arbour in a sunny English country garden collapsed like a cloud of cold steam.

I think I told you about buying the tent. I got it from a film director in the next village. He’s moved back to Hollywood to make multimillion dollar blockbusters. He accepted his calling not with any great whoopee, more resigned dignity, really. ‘I suppose if you’re in oil,’ he said, ‘you have to live somewhere in the North Sea. I make movies and that means we’re going to have to live in Hollywood.’ Then he told me choosing between Beverly Hills and staying here in the tent was about the hardest call he’d ever had to make. Off he went with his family. They tried to hang on to the thing, but they had nowhere to store it properly.

We had quite a panicky phone call from his wife in the middle of the night.