WE ALL WENT ON A / SUMMER HOLIDAY / SO MANY WORRIES / WE HAVE ANXIETY

[spindizzy]

RIGHT, hello my darlings! I'm working backwards through August in my list of Things To Yell About On Here, which means capslocking about France! The obligatory twitter thread with pictures is over here if you want to see pictures of fish and scenery!

I got incredibly lucky with this trip btw; captainraz, my fibling (fake sibling), decided that she wanted to revisit the place her family of origin used to go one holidays, but with her family of choice, splend and hardlyaverage! And as they were driving over, had extra space in the car, and I am a fibling, I got first refusal on filling that space!

... No, I don't know how I pulled off an extra holiday either considering that I spent most of August with £3 total in my bank account. Although hardlyaverage is very strongly of the opinion that this has been my ONLY holiday, because apparently "Worldcon doesn't count" because "it's more of a business trip"?

• The most of French we had between us was splend selling his soul to the Duolingo owl and me trying to remember what I'd been taught in my GCSEs (Although I did realise at one point that splend know exactly enough French that our fluent grasp of Customer Service filled in the gaps enough.) It turns out that all of us have a similar problem, though, in that when we couldn't remember a word in French we defaulted to the next non-English language we knew? So that means we got through Arabic, British Sign Language, Japanese, Latin, Spanish...


• hardlyaverage was VERY stressed about the driving thing, but he did a good job! Apparently he did a lot of homework for this trip, like watching dash-cam footage while someone explained what they were looking out for? But also his background is in civil engineering, so he was a MASSIVE NERD about the roads in France. Apparently he's impressed with how few seams they have?


• We made up a lot of nonsense songs about driving on the right this trip, and it did work!


• We were in a town called Burke-Sur-Mer, somewhere near Calais? And we stayed in a REALLY NICE farm house! Lots of tiled floors and exposed beams, and ENORMOUS ROOMS.
  
  • I apparently didn't put a proper set of photos online, but this was my room with the unnervingly huge cot, and this was the living room? It had TABLES and HUGE COMFY SOFAS, it was so nice? We did end up wandering around it like "Oh hey, they have shutters! I haven't seen those since Jordan!" and "IT HAS A WET ROOM, COMFORTABLE SHOWERS FOR EVERYONE!"
  
  

  • Me: I have no idea how to open these shutters. @HardlyAverage:
    Oh, it's like a friction brake!
    Me: *stares blankly*
    @HardlyAverage:
    ... Like a bra strap.
    Me: *can instantly open the shutters*

    — Susan (@Spindilly) September 2, 2019

  
  
  • The house was in smell range of a pet food factory so the air regularly just smelled like gravy, which made me and captainraz feel right at home.
  
  
  • There was a river at the bottom of the garden! And a chorus of ducks who'd occasionally have Important Meetings around the owners' laundry! And a somewhat confused rooster!
  
  
  • Lex is always like "Ugh, you can't see any stars in cities" so I SPECIFICALLY STOOD OUTSIDE EVERY NIGHT TO CHECK FOR STARS TO SEE IF HE WAS RIGHT! ... Stars are cool. I think I MAYBE managed to piece together a
    couple of constellations? But I have no idea if that was the quantity of stars Lex expects.


• The really cool thing about Spoonies On Holiday: we plan AT MOST two things per day, and at some point everyone else goes for a nap! I, The Insomniac, didn't nap, but did enjoy that time as "curl up in a ball and
  listen to audiobooks while playing phone games" time? Like, hardlyaverage specifically asked me to do no work while we were away, and captainraz
  threatened to become In Cahoots with renay to make sure I didn't take more stuff on, and I... Didn't? Which felt really weird but did leave me SO MUCH audiobook time. (He did the full "I know you won't work, you already told me that you wouldn't" thing and I was just like "... How dare you use the honour system against me, a person with no honour?!")


• Also I realised TOO LATE that I'd signed up to spend a week hanging out with allos in love. THEY'RE SO HAPPY AND LOVE EACH OTHER, WHAT EVEN IS THIS.


• ... Also it turns out that my meds apparently give me a sense of object permanence and that's fucking awful because it means that I can actually be aware that Lex is existing in a place that I AM NOT, and I wasn't going to get any hugs from him for MULTIPLE DAYS, what the hell.

Saturday

• Roadtrip to France!
  
  • Dear Americans: it took us MAYBE five hours to drive to another country from the middle of ours. This is why I keep saying your country is too damn big.
  
  
  • We assembled an enormous playlist for the drive, which obviously means that Spotify played maybe a third of the songs? Total? ... We heard a LOT of the Hamilton Polka, is what I'm saying here.
  
  
  • WE GOT TO PUT THE CAR ON A TRAIN! It was very cool! It smelled like feet! And meant that it took us literally 45 minutes to get to A DIFFERENT COUNTRY, okay, I think that's fantastic.
  
  
  • I missed most of the drive through France though, because I fell asleep, which I only know because I startled myself awake every fifteen minutes. Whoops.


• We were nearly defeated by the check-in process though, because there wasn't one. Like, the doors were unlocked and the keys inside, we just didn't think to try them because what do you mean we can just walk
  straight in?!


• We DID have an awesome barbeque though, and actually got to nest outside in the sunshine for a change! It was really nice! I really liked getting to laze around in the sunshine with my friends, it was pretty
  great! ... Although captainraz did get me to try something called Kiddiboo? It appears to be a cream-cheese on a lollystick that's shaped like a ghost and it was SO SAD IN MY MOUTH, oh
  no.

Sunday

• We did our very best to keep Sunday as a chill-out day, except that we did genuinely need to buy things like food and toilet roll so we had to do a danger run to this hypermarket the next town over?
  
  • I don't understand how a hypermarket that's big enough to have actual rows of OTHER SHOPS INSIDE doesn't stock paracetamol.
  
  
  • We got to practice our French comprehension a fair whack at that supermarket, because it turns out that trying to identify lactose-free milk in a language you don't speak is Interesting?
  
  
  • FRANCE WHAT THE FUCK IS HUMAN COLA. IS IT PEOPLE.
  
  
  • FRENCH SUPERMARKETS SELL MANGA. Amazing. Beautiful. Incredible. I was so ready to give them all of my money for this because I'm FASCINATED with comics industries that don't have to go through America and can thus do whatever the fuck they want. Plus, the french editions of manga usually have really cool physical designs? I resisted, but I was seriously there going "My French reading comprehension is sufficiently better than my Japanese that I'd take my chances for the right title..."
  
  
  • (I did NOT in fact summarise the part of Ada_Palmer's Worldcon talk about the post-WWII manga publishing industry and its effect on literacy levels, but it was SO CLOSE oh my
    god.)


• captainraz laid a lovely fire, but unfortunately caught her hand on the glass window of the
  fire. She's fine! It was pretty minor all things considered! It just startled all of us. ... On the plus side, we did all briefly know the French for burn plasters?????

Monday

• It turns out that France actually has a decent amount of stuff just... Outside where you can use it without having to go in? There was a
  condom machine OUTSIDE the pharmacy (I assume so that no one has an excuse), and one of the supermarkets had a laundrette attached to the outside, which seems INCREDIBLY useful to me! ... Can we get that over
  here?


• So, once we'd sorted out the burn thing, we scoped out the Azincourt museum (closed, although we did make fun of English people INCLUDING US for going there so much that they actually have the road signs in English too around it.), then bounced down to the sea front to scope out the tourist tat and the dogs!
  
  • There was a dog that looked like a tibetan mastiff and I wanted to pet it SO BADLY omg.
  
  
  • It's a good thing that I was looking for tourist tat, because there was SO MUCH! I needed snow globes for jilliferium and a postcard for my mum that DIDN'T have any naked people
    on. GUESS WHICH OF THESE WAS THE HARDER SIDEQUEST.
  
  
  • The sea front was actually surprisingly wheelchair friendly, if you ever want to go there with a wheelchair?


• I think this was the day when everyone's different mental illnesses clashed the worst? Like, captainraz is a spoonie who only values herself if she's being USEFUL, and you all know that I'm a control freak who bites when interrupted, which is a STELLAR combination. ... It was me, I was the arsehole here, Tonks tried to help with the shopping after burning her hand, pushing a wheelchair around all day, and explicitly saying that she was exhausted and in pain, so I started a row. :/ Also I have Resting Bitch Voice and a tendency towards aggressive affirmations, which sets off hardlyaverage's anxiety, and some of the ways people asked for validation or showed affection set of my anxiety... Yeah, I know, I know, I learned and tried harder, okay, and and apparently the three of them are still willing to hang out with me so I might not have fucked it up TOO badly?

Tuesday

• Listen, the only thing we did on Tuesday was go to a fancy restaurant that Tonks remembered from when she was a kid and it was ONE HUNDRED PERCENT WORTH IT.
  
  • PRETTY SURE the owner hustled us into the restaurant before they were actually open, whoops.
  
  
  • The waiter had a grand old time laughing at our French. WE TRIED, OKAY, WE TRIED.
  
  
  • hardlyaverage said that he knew enough French to say "My name is" and "I don't speak French."
    Waiter: Okay. My name is Fred.
    hardlyaverage: Je m'appelle Jameson.
    Waiter: *immediately leaves*
    Us: ????????????
    Waiter: *comes back with a bottle of wine labelled Jameson*
  
  
  • (The waiter assumed that hardlyaverage wanted his steak medium-rare and actually looked impressed when hardlyaverage said he wanted it blue. ... I'd
    already been banned from ordering steak, and I was the only one likely to be a problem on that front.)
  
  
  • The food was GREAT. I had a beef stew and a chocolate mousse, and I feel like I won, although everyone else's creme brulées were okay I guess?
  
  
  • (Still mildly mortified that I didn't realise that they don't bring you a bill and you just paid at the counter, whoops. Like, I'm obviously doing better on the brain-weasel front because I've not had an anxiety
    spiral over it, but orz)


• We played Unstable Unicorns, and I think I liked it a lot! It's mostly a quick, cute little collection game that I'm tempted to get as a game to play in the pub? But also I don't think I've actually played a card game with these three in about... Seven years? Maybe? And it turns out that hardlyaverage likes baiting screwovers so no one targets Tonks, I'm the one being baited, captainraz is VERY competitive, and splend
  is the one who stays quiet until he wins outta fuckin NOWHERE.

Wednesday

• Wednesday we were going to go to a water park, but it turns that we just missed the window for it being open on weekdays, so we went to an aquarium instead!


• Most of the aquarium is built around this one (1) huge tank full of sharks and rays and... Fish that aren't as instantly recognisable as sharks and rays? That was cool! It had the tunnel to walk through and a window the size of a building, and we DID just spend like twenty minutes sitting on the floor in front of this window looking at the fish. It was VERY soothing.


• The other things that they had was a tank that was ENTIRELY SHARKS AND SEA TURTLES, which was my favourite bit of the aquarium! TURTLE FRIEND. Like, the sea lions were ALSO cool, and the penguins too, but S E A T U R T L E.


• (I would have tried to get more photos, but gravity is my nemesis so I never dare hold my phone over barriers. Anxiety!)


• hardlyaverage was about as excited about the sharks as captainraz was about the rays and I was about the sea turtles, it was adorable.


• You know what's fun? Wooden spirals between levels where the planks aren't completely secure. *screams internally*


• WE TOUCHED SOME FISH! I think we lost captainraz for a good chunk of time because she wanted to touch the rays, and a dogfish(?) STORMED ACROSS THE TANK to try to chomp on splend.


• The shop had a teddy penguin that was nearly as big as me!!! And GIANT squid teddies! I bought another snowglobe for Jill and postcard for my mum, a shark in a ball for Lex, and bought something that WASN'T FOOD for me! I have mermaid earrings now! And a model sea turtle because the colour was just too nice??????

Thursday

• We went to the beach, beach, let's go get away! (Jameson, a benevolent soul, did put Starships on his spotify so I could listen to it on the beach.) captainraz was very much NO ONE SHOULD GO INTO THE SEA BAREFOOT, which I respected for a while and then went "fuck it, what is the point of being at the beach if you don't end up with mud in your toe-nails?" and went off to splash. (She and hardlyaverage were responsible adults who wore neoprene shoes in the sea, bless their hearts, while I was there barefoot and yelling things like "I NEVER KNEW THAT WEARING SKIRTS MADE PADDLING SO MUCH EASIER!")


• hardlyaverage finally got to stand in the sea for the first time in SO LONG and I'm so happy for him! (Sam and I kinda just did our own thing and let him have his moment with captainraz, but !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)


• Sam managed to figure out how to order crepes to go in french! I ended up with the DENSEST whippy ice cream I've ever had, and also learning that whippy ice cream comes in flavours now? The future is a strange place.


• So yes, being in the sea was good for all of us, except splend who is a sensible soul and doesn't do nonsense like that.

Friday

• Friday was mostly "Quick, we need to run to a supermarket and buy all of the souvenirs and dubious snacks that we've missed!" We ended up in a smaller one than the hypermarket, because everyone else finds that one overwhelming... So naturally I found the tiny supermarket incredibly overwhelming and hide to hide in a stationery aisle for a bit because it was too much.


• captainraz and I both ended up with french-ruled notebooks because this is who we are as people.


• But yeah, most of what we did that day was eating as much of the non-transportable food as we could. ... We may have bought A LOT of bread, okay. And many pastries. And don't even get me started on the ice cream. WE WERE ON HOLIDAY, I WE COULD NOT HAVE BEEN STOPPED.

Saturday (again)

• We managed to get packed up, tidied up, and actually OUT THE DOOR with time to spare, whaaaaaaaaaaaat!


• The house had a couple of guestbooks in it for people to leave comments, and one of the first entries in the oldest one was written by captainraz's mum! It's weird but kinda cool,
  and it brought a really nice sense of... Continuity, maybe, seeing Tonks filling in the book with her new family. Which I think is maybe what she wanted out of this trip! That and to pet farm dogs.


• I am ready to throw down with all of the service stations in the south, btw, because they're not accessible in any way. :/


• I, a fool, managed to injure myself at LITERALLY the last minute before the holiday ended; I was helping to bring all the luggage in from the car, caught my foot on the doorstep, and managed do the slow-mo
  fall-to-your-knees anime thing. Managed to not scratch my hands at all, but get a properly dramatic cut on my knee! (I only bled a little bit on the house, and I cleaned it up afterwards so it's FINE.)


• I went back to Jameson/Tonks/Sam's, and Lex came to pick me up! Which meant that I got to hug his ridiculous beautiful face after OVER A WEEK of not seeing it and I was a ridiculous creature because it turns out that I love him a lot and I was so happy to see him! ;_________________;


• And then I had one (1) day to recover before I went back to my dayjob, because I'm GREAT at planning. Also wtf how was this only TWO WEEKS AGO, that can't be right.

... I've no fucking clue how I'm going to get all of these snowglobes to our Jill though. OI, SISTER, COME TO NOTTINGHAM.