Richard Hearn’s holiday on the rocks

The trick of making a one week summer holiday feel like a two week summer holiday is to write a column. That way, you get to lengthen out its description to last two weeks (also known as: this is a barrel that I’m going to take a fortnight to scrape).

So here it is; part one of our week long holiday in Bath. And if I have to come up with a theme for this week, it’s going to be ‘stones and rocks of various sizes’. The main stone, of course, is the Bath Stone, which gives the city its distinctive colouring and uniform feel. It reminded me of Edinburgh with a warm filter, and is genuinely beautiful, even in the rain – and rain is so much a feature of our summer holidays, it reminds me of them.

On the stone theme, there were also ‘Roxy’ and ‘Peblo’, two christened pieces of gravel from just outside our holiday home, or “Ordayoam” as Youngest™ called it. Roxy and Peblo became well-travelled gravel over the week, going to Bristol Zoo and across the Clifton Suspension Bridge, and have now relocated to Hove. ‘Roxy and Peblo’ is also now the title of my newly-written children’s book (interested publishers can contact me via Latest Homes).
The fact that gravel played a key feature in our holiday shouldn’t surprise regular readers; The Boy has always been great at creating makeshift toys from the most mundane items. I just wish they weren’t so loseable, which always causes anguish.

“We ended up sleeping in a bus shelter on what must have been the coldest night of my life”

Roxy and Peblo also went to Avebury to see the stones there (a kind of ‘Meet the Ancestors’). Now this is where I divert from the present and tell you about my single previous trip there. It was 22 years ago, I was an art student in London, and one January weekend a friend wanted to get out of the capital. We took a coach to Salisbury and a local bus to Avebury. We arrived there mid-afternoon with no easy way back and imagined – wrongly – that we’d be able to find some kind of hostel or cheap B&B. The next bus was at eight in the morning. Hopelessly unprepared, we ended up sleeping in a bus shelter on what must have been the coldest night of my life. Between some rocks and a hard place. One two-hour period was spent trying to get warm by walking round and round a puddle that was slowly freezing throughout the night; it was like a rubbish version of a camp fire. It was the coldest and most uncomfortable night of my life. And 22 years on, I’m very glad I did it.
Where was I? Oh, on the way back this time, we also went to Stonehenge.

Illustration: Paul Lewis www.pointlessrhino.com