Bucko's World

Entry Date: Thursday 6th August 2009
Two years…..two WHOLE years. It’s a pretty long time to be given to organise something. I’m sure if you were told to take two years to organise a little soiree for you and some chums off to foreign climes you’d say “no problem, two whole years, piece of fucking piss…!” You would then, of course, forget about it for 23 months and then go into a massive panic trying to set something up at the last minute all the while wondering why you didn’t get going sooner. Which is how, in a round about way, I come to be staring into an empty suitcase with less than two days before the biggest, most expensive holiday of my life, and I’ve not got the faintest idea what I’m going to put in it….

But, I’m ahead of myself…..

It all started on a cold, windy and mildly depressing day on a beach in Ouddorp, Netherlands, as me and some of my friends, fresh from a night a of fantastic music from the ever brilliant Marillion, attempted to walk off our hangovers. As we strolled along in wind chilly enough to chap a polar bear’s chaps, we mused how lovely it would be in the summer, with the sun out and the sky blue on this beautiful, immense strand of the Dutch coast. There were in fact only three problems we could think of :-
1) The beach was so big you couldn’t even see the sea from where we were, it was at least a mile away.
2) The sea, when you got there, was of the North variety, very popular around those well known bathing areas of Newcastle and Scotland, and because of this is both fucking freezing and full of used tampons.
3) It’s in the most grey, depressing and downright boring place in the world – Holland.

The plan soon conceived then was not to holiday here, but to save a few quid, and take a couple of cheap weeks off on a beach in Greece, Spain, Italy – wherever – and very nice it would be too….

Unfortunately the excitement of agreeing to a good old fashioned few days in the sun, combined with beer, wine and the generally over-reaching nature of me and my mates once drunk, meant by the time the evening was out we’d all agreed that what we really wanted was three weeks in Florida with two weeks of theme parks, water rides and anatomically incorrect animals followed by a week by the sea…………

And now we’re right back, over two years later, with me staring into that empty suitcase. Fortunately for me, my wife has been rather brilliant and actually spent the last two years organising the trip, so there’s unlikely to be any last minute hiccups there. I was tasked with literally one job, which was this….have your case packed by Monday. And here we are on Thursday with it containing nothing more than my iPod and a copy of Guitarist magazine, both of which shouldn’t be in there as they’re supposed to be in my hand luggage. All in all, not a very impressive start…