Raven Smith’s Trivial Pursuits

This overabundance of work can make you pre-holiday sick, but exhaustion is the price for escaping, an evacuee of regular employment. You earn your leave by running on pure adrenalin and repeating to yourself, ‘I’ll sleep on the plane, I’ll sleep on the plane.’ You need to be dead-body-tired to feel you’ve earned the trip, otherwise you’re an indulgent self-serving monster, one step away from women who lunch. Don’t slog hard enough and the undercurrent of opulence will drown you. Your body will wash up on a beach of gold bullion, rubies foaming at your mouth. You don’t deserve a life of all play and no work and shuffling your kids off to boarding school like Baroness von Schraeder. Your life will be brunch-time golf and lunch-time facials and three-martini afternoons. All the scenes on Mad Men when they’re not at the office. Vacationing is your self-care dialled up to eleven, like when Madonna started Wellness with Kabbalah. But you can’t be all work and no play, it’s biased. You’re yin with no yang. Fish without chips. Sandpaper with no rough side. You’re one Chuckle Brother. A single Olsen. I don’t want to sound dramatic, but after a particularly savage bout of pre-holiday work I developed what I’m certain was either pneumonia or lung cancer or both (I was too scared to Google my symptoms). Before a transatlantic flight I downed a depressingly gendered ‘ManFlu Shot’ at Heathrow. I do not say this lightly, but it saved my life. After the fish course, I slept deeply for seven hours and sprang into JFK like Tigger on six espressos. It would have saved hours if they’d sent a Manflu Hot or Shot after the Thai boys in the cave from the get-go.

It’s glorious to swap the rat race for a queue at the ice-cream van, but the biggest holiday taboo is a winter body on a summer beach. You must get in shape by any means necessary. ‘In shape’ means you but a dress size smaller, or with more muscly arms, or just after the stomach flu. The ‘in-shape’ regime begins months before the vacation, as leisurely as the poo you have when nobody else is home because you have time on your side. You will simply eat less and move more. Part of the problem with eating sublimely all day – quinoa porridge and a light lunch of carrot tops – means you’re clucking for a pint of lard when you get home. Your naughty inner toddler wants ice cream for dinner, like the French aristocracy in Les Misérables. I creamed a cream. You allow this gastronomic transgression because the holiday is weeks away, but you begin to panic as take-off looms closer. Will you fit through the departures gate? You want a hot body? You better work bench. You hit the gym hard. You write Hotel, motel, holiday thin on Post-its above the treadmill. You survive on laxative tea and egg whites. After all the militant work and a dash to the airport, you break your fast with a takeaway baguette at Luton airport at 6 a.m. Auf wiedersehen, Prêt. You ‘accidentally’ drink the tap water in a grubby restaurant for a restorative bout of diarrhoea.

People get evangelical about the correct way to pack a suitcase, dishing out tips like a Sunday sermon. As with organised religion, your own moral compass is usually enough. Trust only your own instincts. Pack your bag and go. You’ll always have too many long-sleeves and not enough pants. A linen suit is dashing, but will never see the light of day. I always pack multiple white T-shirts, because it’s not a question of if you spill on then, just when. I always want to look like I’ve been on the road a while, and acclimatised to the temperature, rolling from Greek village to Greek village absorbing acquaintances and atmosphere and chatting to really old locals in bars. I want to give off the romantic air of a man of the world, not a two-week tourist, so I need my outfits to appear a little lived-in, but also hardy and practical. Shorts with enough pockets for my compass and penknife and luxury leather wallet. A neckerchief to stop condensation running down my spine. I want to look like the sort of languid person who can play ‘Nowhere Man’ on guitar (I can’t), and has a lot of stories to tell (I don’t), with a girl in every port (nope). He smokes rollups. He nurses half a beer. I don’t wear shorts because it’s sunny, I wear them because of Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, Italian beaches with Picasso, and Howard Carter when he discovered Tutankhamun. Or the sexy police chief from Jaws. A Myspace top eight of men’s legs traversing the globe. I want to be an archaeologist, not a holidaymaker; a zookeeper, not a backpacker. To have a purpose beyond touristing and tanning. I don’t dress for mai tais at Soho House. I honestly don’t. I don’t dress to lob coins in the Trevi Fountain or to pretend to push the Tower of Pisa over. I nod to historic pioneers and grafting ancestors and the ever-so-problematic colonialists. This is my truth. When I travel I also want the bulky, irritating thirties luggage that takes several bellboys to manoeuvre to your suite, and I want someone else I employ to quietly slip them a crisp note for their troubles. A monogrammed trunk is the final boss of vacation packing, but it’s a bugger to lift. I love saying I’m low-maintenance and then packing a month’s worth of skincare into a leather weekender for an overnight stay thirty-five minutes from my house. I wish I knew how to quit you, Retinol.

Some people want to fill the world with silly little love songs. These people don’t get cheap flights out of Luton at 4 a.m. You need to dull the noise. The first thing I do when I get to an airport is head to that fishy rotunda of high stools and order white wine. It’s always near the diminutive Fortnum’s. The wine is expensive and unnecessary, which is the exact mood of any vacation. I sip Sancerre until I’m rehabilitated from the systematic abuse of check-in and security. The first thing I do on the plane is order a bloody mary. I don’t like them, but that’s beside the point. People who drink bloody marys are default dashing fifties bachelors. I read that the Queen drinks a gin and Dubonnet before lunch, a glass of wine with her lunch, and a glass of champagne before bed, and I follow this triptych hourly as I fly. After this concoction of booze you have a wonderful flight, even in the middle seat with the worst turbulence. Wherever I am in the royal booze cycle I always down a glass of champagne before landing. At the hotel I order a martini as dry as my face when I’m fake-crying to get out of trouble. With a twist. Olives on the side. Not crisps. I sleep till noon the next day.

I always say you’re not on holiday until you’ve got drunk twice and had sex twice. The way you achieve this is carte blanche. People get horny in prickly heat. One cousin will emerge from a cloud of Impulse with newly budded breasts and you’ll all pretend you haven’t noticed. After you’ve done all your selfies for the day, spritz your facial mist and lie back and think of nothing. Read whatever you want, too. The trashier the better. When Amazoning holiday reads copy Rihanna singles and alternate between nuanced, emotional hard-hitters and banging classics. A dishevelled, carefully undone mood permeates each sunlit second. Like a bag of chips, the perfect beach hair has just the right amount of salt. You get butterflies in the stomach from too much heat. The smell of Piz Buin mixes with Malibu, blowing through the jasmine of your mind. Your face hurts from smiling. You’re that person. You pat aloe vera on peeling shoulders under a paper-thin top you Febreze every night. Batman’s utility belt, but full of suntan lotion and aftersun. Swimming naked. Dining in jelly shoes. Sex is great, but have you ever had three ouzos in a taverna? You’ll have a series of crushes on inappropriate waiting staff. By all means shag the kitchen porter if you can shake the image of where his hands have been. You momentarily commit to single-use everything – napkins, straws, lovers. Non-stop daiquiris. Non-stop dancing. Non-stop dick. Catching crabs is a thrilling game of jeopardy, rather than a worry. Sand gets into every nook and cranny and you just laugh. You get sick on the coach from too many windy roads.

You’ll mainly eat crisps. The occasional salad. Three different varieties of crisp in a bowl is a type of salad. But when you travel it’s imperative to visit the first McDonald’s you see and sample the local delicacies. The one in the airport doesn’t count. In Japan I detoured a press trip to a Shinjuku Maccy Ds for a 4 a.m. tasting menu. The green Fanta was excellent, a supernatural gunge colour signalling how desperately bad for you it must be. A tonic for my barbed-wire throat after refusing the microphone at karaoke. The giant spicy chicken nugget was more of a question than an answer, essentially a deep-fried disc of salted enigma that still perplexes. But the carbonara fries changed our collective lives. Carbonara fries immediately feel like a bad idea, like the people still wearing pun versions of Make America Great Again hats. Carbonara fries doesn’t even sound Japanese, does it? But there comes a point in every young man’s life when he must rethink all he holds to be true. Bittersweet and strange, finding you can change, learning you were wrong. Our preconceptions of carbonara fries: an unnecessary union, defamation of two sublime and independent dishes. A cut and shut car. A bootleg, flying in the face of God. But in this instance God is Nigella Lawson and she’s silently sobbing. Lo! Behold! the greatest dish on the planet. The ‘chefs’ at McDonald’s have reinvented the wheel. On first taste carbonara fries assault your very humanness. An explosion in the mouth like throwing water on a chip-fat fire. An immense salty jizz of translucent sauce fists great punches of parmesan into your gullet like an overzealous lover grabbing you by the throat when the safe word is ‘more parmesan’. It’s just the most needlessly cheesy foghorn, blasting cheese down your chest into your guts and soggy in the wrong places like drunk sex. The sauce is stabbed through with heroic shards of bacon like angry bees span swarming half a grapefruit but the grapefruit is a potato cut into matchsticks and fried to perfection. We finished the lot humming ‘Food, Glorious Food’, and we Ubered back to our hotel, happy as pigs in shit (that were gladly sacrificed to become the bacon on carbonara fries).

At some point you have to come home from vacation, because you miss your clean white linen and your fancy French cologne. Head back to the absurdities of everyday life and the sinkhole of adult responsibilities (similar to kids’ responsibilities if they had to pay taxes). But before you board easysqueezyJet you need to deliver the ultimate humblebrag: a postcard. Postcards, the worst invention known to humanity. Worse than the atomic bomb or Chewits or belly shots. There are two types of postcard. First there are the picturesque twee tableaus of model villages sent by undersexed Wes Anderson Oxford alumni whose specialist subject on Mastermind is Hogwarts. The second type of postcard is the chunkily sexual teenage-boy-who’s-never-seen-tits-in-the-flesh innuendo postcard – an archipelago of women’s arses in neon thongs, men basking in the shade of an obese woman, a man’s penis wearing sunglasses. To be honest, I sort of love those unwoke postcards. Feel free to send me those, but if you send me a Wes Anderson postcard may someone with the flu lick your Ryanair tray table. You do not wish I was there. You are atoning for your own enjoyment. Sorry to be that guy, but have you ever read a postcard that stayed with you after ten minutes? Be honest. I don’t mean a MoMA postcard with compact-but-touching emotive script. I mean a list of taverns and tourist traps. Again, sorry to be that guy, but can you think of a single postcard you’ve been sent that touched you? A dramatic postcard? Or an arresting one? A postcard so illuminating and eye-catching and staggeringly surprising that it inspired awe? A transcendent postcard, both humbling and sensational? Impressive in its subtlety, yet awe-inspiring in its nuanced articulation? A postcard that reminded you how great it is to be alive, like the Scrooge ghosts or that lumpectomy that came back benign?

The problem is, no matter how small your handwriting, postcards are only ever a tiny morsel of the full trip experience. Thirty degrees of the 360. You only ever get a manageable highlights reel, like GCSE Bitesize. The bare bones that basically say ‘Ate stuff, saw stuff.’ And it’s incredibly hard to escape the latent boast or the ingrained gloat in such a short form. Teensy bits of paper lack depth. There’s a reason the Ten Commandments weren’t written on A5. There’s a reason we don’t protest with postage stamps. Postcards are the preserve of a bygone era, when people couldn’t show off their lives on Instagram. We’re so digital now that seeing someone’s handwriting is like seeing their nutsack. Their signature has a perverse intimacy. Postcarding is a dying art, like falconry or plumbing, because we’re conditioned to expect more from short-form content. It’s difficult to read something short that isn’t an instant-laugh meme or doesn’t want you to buy something. We’ll be sorry in the future when all the digital data gets wiped by the Rihanna hacker in Ocean’s 8. The digital world will disappear, the Cloud will disperse. We’ll clutch our postcards to our chests and fondly caress them. We’ll dig out the Yellow Pages and meet in person. Our attention spans and short-term memories will come back.

Until then, wear white to show off your radiation burn while the Macarena plays softly on piano.

Marathon Love

When you first meet someone it’s a like a starter’s pistol going off. Bang bang he shot me down. The energy is electric. A rush, a surge, a sprint forward. You start pelting headlong like a blinkered horse. Running like a tap. Running like Obama for president. Running like clockwork towards an unknown finish line. Each little spark of discovery igniting more passion. Pining for their newness, their novelty. Scientists say it’s all projection – that we see mainly what we want to see, mixed with a few matching pheromones, like the Sorting Hat put you both in Hufflepuff and you both wear CK One. A biological fuckery. Truffle pigs sniffing each other out like gourmet fungus. But honestly, who cares about the science? Once you get the scent you tear downhill, risking a nosedive that will mash your front teeth onto the pavement. Race through the halcyon opening numbers. First date, first kiss, first finger. Luck be a lady every night. When you’re a gay you get the added frisson of who will pay for dinner and who will top. It’s a thrill ride, like a ghost train with manageable scares because it’s not too serious yet. You’re not all the way committed. It’s a cushioned kamikaze and you’re bolstered by the energy of the new. New car, new girl, new ice, new glass. You’re whipped into a sandstorm frenzy, never waiting long enough for the dust to settle, tearing forward like pingpong balls in the updraught. Venice is for lovers, so you go for the weekend. Let’s punt in Oxford. A weekend in the Lakes. Did my heart not love till Slough? Paris in the spring? And flowers are brilliant. Une douzaine de roses, s’il vous plaît.

The aggressive romancing you do to snare a partner is textbook and contrived and naff. That’s all part of the fun, because in the early days of a love affair, in romcom world, the impossible is made possible. The workaholic boss ends up with the office temp. The ugly duckling emerges from behind her glasses and bags the coolest guy in school. The nerd gets the girl. Life before was flat, but love reinflates your tyre on the side of a dual carriageway. Falling in love is brilliant. You are Jake Gyllenhaal coming back down the mountain after getting his cheeks clapped by Heath Ledger. Beaming like the Cheshire cat. It’s like when your Instagram post is doing numbers. You manically sprint through this phase, pausing only for a Lucozade Sport and hand jobs. You forget simple things because your head is full of him. Or her. You don’t keep up with the current political hell (there’s always some). You run out of food at home. You have sex in daylight, arrive at events late and just-showered. You throw out compliments like the guy feeding penguins fish at London Zoo. Turtledoves working out how to spend Christmas. Their cute foibles are still cute. The word prenup just a whisper.

Fall in love. Stay in love. These are the rules of life. There’s very little grey area. No margin for error. Do not get left on the shelf. Do no old maid. Do not Grey Gardens. Fall in love, stay in love. The mantra is a maypole for your entire existence that all the other ribbons plait around. I will fall in love and the rest will fall into place. It’s fantastic to become incredibly successful at a job you love and eat the food you love and see the world. But all that is noise outside of the fall-in-love mantra, an unmoving maypole to dance round.

As the first wave of tsunami love subsides you find yourself attached. Tethered. Coupled. Staying in love. That’s not a bad thing. But it’s not a sprint either. It’s more leisurely. A foot taken half off the gas. Being in love isn’t like falling in love. It’s more of an inert gas that forms around you as a couple, and sometimes a few drops of condensation fall. There are glorious months, or even years, when you still posture with money, booking exotic faraway trips and non-invasive beauty treatments. You still get on famously. The falling in love part tends to take your mind off everything else, but real life starts to ebb back in as time passes. Your heart rate de-escalating after intercourse, lying in the dark, remembering that email unsent in drafts.

I need to go back in time before we go forward in this piece. If you want my future, forget my past. In retrospect, all the young dudes I slept with in my youth were stepping stones en route to my husband, but I didn’t know that so I mourned each of them like those old women on Kos in all black. My lovers were a series of false starts, a lengthy warm-up. None of them were tonics. These guys were mouthfuls of dry gin and bitter lemon. We’re all, I think, attracted to a danger of sorts when we’re young. There’s something about the invincibility of youth that makes us desire instability, the destabilising rock of rock ’n’ roll. We love the idea that musicians act insane offstage. That their creativity comes from eccentricity, some brain alchemy that distinguishes a true creative from mere mortals. Michael Jackson, David Bowie, Madonna. All somehow other. All somehow flawed (sometimes fatally), a fissure running down the middle of their excellence. We’re never satisfied with stable, we want a peculiarity, we want a fault line of danger.

Dating bad boys is a real thrill, there’s no denying it. But bad boys grow into bad men. I was magnetically drawn to guys who seemed like they never slept, in tight jeans and billowy seventies blouses under leather jackets, as was the rage. Complete idiots were catnip. Bleeding arrogant two-bob cunts turned my head. The fucking hours I clocked up obsessing over men that didn’t fancy me at all. I really should invoice them.

Most relationships start online now, so I always think of those early endeavours as traditional and even more chaotic because every decision was based on gut feeling and adrenalin. Every great love story tells you drama is the key to happiness, but that approach tends to leave you single, with a clapped-out adrenal gland. I dated countless Tybalts we both thought were Romeos. I once dated a kleptomaniac. It was short-lived, on account of his deep, bleeding wound of despair over the death of his sister, clumsily staunched with stolen H&M belts. He’s fine now, by the way (I’ve always been a little bit too self-involved to be a proper ‘rescuer’). Another boyfriend was a more sensible choice, but choosing sensibly is in itself doomed, because snuggles in your twenties are not cool, and I wanted to be swept off my feet. Staggeringly, two of my exes ended up together, proving you can re-gift ex-boyfriends like unwanted scented candles. I’m being flippant, because I was properly devastated and it took fucking ages to stop picturing them rutting. My smile is my make-up I wear since my break-up with you. Like the assassin bug that wears the corpses of its victims as armour, these experiences built quite a nice shield to keep me safe. I zipped any signs of vulnerability into my skinny jeans, layered up my blouses, and kept drinking.

There are two types of love. One that makes you cry a lot and feel very alive. The other makes you feel totally safe. Great relationships, in my experience, contain very little drama but still a great deal of feeling. They make for bad telly. Anthony and Cleopatra on Gogglebox doesn’t quite work. Dating the wrong type of guy is all very thrilling before the coin flips and it becomes incredibly tiring. I was exhausted when I met my husband, and my patience for bullshit was paper-thin. We had just the right amount of dicking about. And he’s still the most matter-of-fact person I know. It’s been a full decade since we met on the top deck of the night bus. A ten-year lease. A decade of us. Cut me open and count the rings. I remember being ten years old, so I guess our relationship can legally be arrested and can remember throwing up jelly sweets at Alton Towers. It can be measured in food fads, and the meals I would cook for him regularly and faux-casually. The cottage-pie years, the ratatouille years, the meat-zza years (revolting, but I was more anti-carbs then).

The cottage pies started about six months into the relationship, when we lived separately and I wanted more of a commitment, and the pies reflected that desire to seal the deal – we once had cottage pie with a cauliflower cheese topping. In one dish. These are the stupid things you do for love when you’re in a low-responsibility professional role and can be on the bus home with Waitrose mince by 6 p.m. Nowadays we get a boughie little organic veg box delivered on a Wednesday, which my husband has no idea what to do with. He’s from the school of cooking where you buy all the ingredients at the same time to make the meal, which I find infuriating and irksome and desperately attractive. I’m from the significantly more pretentious school of kitchen goddessing, where true cooking means being able to rustle something up out of nothing. We always have a stack of eggs, and I believe you can grate pretty much anything into a frittata if you chase it with enough cheese.

I digress. This chapter would never end if I mentioned every time I fell more in love with him, so we’ll skip past any more saccharine reminiscing of our particular love sprint. We got married for the only reason gays get married: as a piece of homonormative propaganda to wind up the other gays. Fast-forward from the sprint to the marathon, reality biting so hard as you knuckle down, saving your cash and energy for important life stuff. A cat, maybe, a mortgage, a kid. All the living you do between vacations.

A long-term relationship is like following a very complex Agatha Christie novel, knowing you missed key plot points earlier and they’ll come back to haunt you. There are red herrings and false clues, but you don’t get the luxury of a library in your house or art deco architraves. You can’t skip ahead, there are no spoilers, and you either die on the last page or break up. P.S. When I die my last will and testament is just a schedule to feed the cat and instructions for smuggling my ashes into the meals of my enemies.

Of all the things I ever wanted for my life – marriage, kids, unlimited access to shortbread – I never thought it would be this much hard work. I thought you could fire up the engine at university and leave it running all the way to middle age. Keep your head down until retirement. ‘My whole life will be a banquet!’ I thought. After a hearty breakfast of education I’ll take a gap-year palate-cleanser and coast in a fulfilling job until all the pudding at the end. I’d discard healthy eating and exercise just before death. Burn my body in the house like Gilbert Grape’s mom. I planned to muddle through the stodgy mains and fudge the edges. But there’s been absolutely no fudge since university. It’s like running Charlie’s Chocolate Factory without sugar or cocoa solids and having to turn a profit while the stakeholders gather outside with pitchforks and an effigy.