I don't know about you, but I am far from enthralled by the thought of travel in these, my dwindling years. Even in the face of extraordinary hotel and flight discounts, which once would have produced a Scrooge-like hooray from me, I find I am not that interested. To my way of thinking, travel today smacks of riding the rails in the Hungry Thirties, and is just as enticing.
Before you fill my mailbox with unkind remarks, let me explain my theory: I don't yearn to feel like a steer on the way to the "Goodbye House." Soon, I predict airport employees will be wearing white gloves as they do in Tokyo's overflowing transit system to push the frightened populace onto waiting airplanes at so-called bargain prices.
A group called the "Finish Line Club" (another euphemism for "your time is almost up") has just arrived back from the Far Seas Tour of a (so-called) Lifetime. Several are still missing from the forced parasailing course in Yemen, the underlying problem being that because they are seniors, there is not a great deal of motivation to search. Besides, by this time many of them, because of prevailing winds, might well be in Turkey, clinging to a ledge staring at a nearby goat.
I heard another story about a leisurely and blissful trip down the Danube in a barge. At one point entering Germany, a four-metre bratwurst was brought aboard for the Canadian seniors' supper that night. The conveyors of this monster sausage left out the bit that they had dropped the meaty monster into the less-than-blue river, with the net result that most of the hungry seniors would have given it a pass if they had but known.
In my view I always give sausages a wide berth, as I have known not a few chefs who have confessed that everything but old boots are put into them. Needless to say, during the night nature took its cruel course, and so many of the by-then crazed Canucks had humiliated themselves in front of the appalled staff that a mass exodus was ordered by the captain just before he deserted from his now-uninhabitable ship.
As it is, there are not many club mems who have not called upon the services of an ambulance plane to rescue them from some sub-tropical island or a frosty fjord at one time or another. They seem to wear it as a badge of some sort, as if it is just a further extension of the trip, as it were.
One chap who was confined to a wheelchair, a colonel I think, was dragged to the top of a Himalayan mountain range, but then left because he did not tip the surly sherpas. Perhaps it was because his hands where frozen to his hat, so he could not get his wallet out speedily enough for the brusque natives. He is there still, I suppose.
I think a little travel is good for the soul and all that, but not at our age, for we have become a burden and it is best we stay here with those who love us. I am always up for jaunty trip up-Island to read quietly from Byron beside a brook or some such, as long as the covenant is met: that I am tucked up with an arrowroot biscuit and a cup of hot chocolate in my own bed that same night before the TV news.
I know this upsets my wife a great deal, but I do not enjoy sleeping in those frightful B&Bs called "Ye Olde" something, with the proprietors dressed as elves. It is too much for my sensitive soul.
I wish to be left alone in my library and not find myself on a forced march across Europe, expected to do 30 kilometres a day while a grinning guide shouts at us about cathedrals.
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