Tina Seskis's new novel, The Honeymoon, is out now. It is the story of the ultimate holiday disaster, of someone's brand new husband going missing on their honeymoon. To celebrate, Tina tells us about her own holiday mishaps...
Tina Seskis
The first time I went on holiday with my now-husband, we flew to Dublin. I have only recently realised, eighteen years later, that my husband is scared of flying. We were late getting to the airport, as was my wont in those days, which just added to his stress. Once in Dublin we hired a car to travel to Kerry. Somewhere in the middle of absolutely nowhere in the dark I came off the road and hit a rock, bursting the tyre. I had a fit of histrionics. My husband, who at the time had never been anything other than tolerant and good-natured, told me to shut the f*** up and then ignored my tantrum as he proceeded to fix the car. We didn’t talk for the next twelve hours. By the end of that week I knew I wanted to marry him.
Years ago I was coming back from the Dordogne with some friends, and we were taking it in turns to drive. I was in the front with my friend Marc, and we were chatting. I got onto the motorway and thought, good, I can relax for a while, as I didn’t like driving on the right side of the road very much. I was going at a steady seventy miles an hour when Marc suddenly said, in an admirably calm voice, “Aren’t you going to stop?” In front of me was a huge bank of toll booths. I was tired, and not concentrating, and I hadn’t noticed them (can you spot a driving pattern here?). I slammed on the brakes. It was raining. The car went into a long, smooth diagonal plane, and it felt slow, and tranquil… And then the front driver’s side of the car smashed into the concrete kerb of the toll booth. It wrecked the steering, and the tyre and the wheel of my friend’s car, and to this day I can’t remember how we got home. Marc lives in America now so I haven’t seen him in ages, but once again thank you, for saving us all. The other two do still talk to me, which as I write this I realise is remarkably good of them.
I dreamed of the perfect honeymoon, on a luxury island in the Maldives. Instead I spent part of it with my inlaws and my parents, yet without my husband (who, to be fair, was at his brother’s wedding rehearsal). I was pregnant. The others got roaring drunk and told me they hated our son’s prospective name (they all subsequently backtracked). At the end of our honeymoon my husband left our camera in a bar, so we have no photos of the trip. I booked our internal flight from Adelaide to Sydney for the wrong day, meaning we ended up travelling for over fifty hours on the way home. At Heathrow my husband got caught in the immigration queue for two hours, while I sat crying. My parents picked us up, and a man almost ran me over in the carpark, and my mum had a go at the man and then my husband got into a physical fight with him. We didn’t talk all the way home. We’re still married though.
I was travelling with a friend in the tea hills of Karnataka in India. One night we were invited to the local harvest festival, which involved being fed at every house in the village. In the middle of the night my friend woke me, saying she had stomach ache. I told her she’d eaten too much and to take a couple of paracetamol, and then promptly fell back to sleep. The next morning she was severely ill, and so I took her to the local hospital. The doctor diagnosed acute appendicitis and admitted us both (yes, really). I was despatched to the pharmacy to get a whole carrier-bag-load of drugs, which were promptly pumped through my friend via a drip attached to a rusty old stand. I had no idea what they were. The phone lines were down. We were the only ones in the hospital. It was filthy and had no running water, so I had to fetch water from the well. I had to do every aspect of the nursing. We soon became local celebrities, and people began arriving to stare at us through the barred windows. On the third night my friend lost consciousness. I called (ie, stood at the hospital door and yelled my head off) for someone to get the doctor and when he turned up he was drunk. Fortunately he managed to revive her – I held the torch while he put the needle in her arm. The next morning I realised enough was enough and took her to a bigger hospital nearby, but they were not equipped to deal with her condition either. We finally reached our third hospital, in the city of Mysore, five days after my friend had first been taken ill. On arrival the consultant said he was going to operate immediately. A nurse sat outside the operating theatre with me, holding my hand, saying that God would be with her. I was thinking, what kind of a hospital is this, that all the nurses can do is pray, but it turned out she was a nun, from the next-door room (a fellow nun had been bitten by a snake). My friend came round, and now has the neatest appendix scar ever. Our nun neighbours adopted us and brought us food every day. We spent Christmas 1997 in the Mission Hospital in Mysore and the nurses wore white saris and were like angels, and the experience was beautiful and humbling. I only found out afterwards that acute appendicitis is life-threatening, which is probably just as well.
Many years ago my boyfriend from university and I decided to go on holiday together. He was still in Bath and I was in London by then, so we had a weekend relationship and didn’t get to see each other much. We went to the travel agents (as you did in those days) and sat opposite an uninspiring man in a once-white shirt, who offered us cut-price deals to places like Rhodes and Majorca and Benidorm. Nothing appealed, and so we said we would think about it and left. As we were driving back to my boyfriend’s parents’ place, I confessed that I didn’t really want to go on holiday. He said he felt the same. I admitted that I found the idea of us spending a week together too hard. He said he felt the same. We parked up and talked for a while. We agreed to split up. He got out of the car and I drove back to London and we never saw each other again. We had been together for two years. Now that’s a holiday disaster with a difference.
