I’ve just returned from a walking holiday in Northumberland with Caroline and my mother-in-law. I say ‘walking’ but that makes it sound more physically demanding than it was. Billed as ‘gentle guided walking’, it was more like an ambling holiday, and the distances weren’t very great. On the second day, I was anxious to make it to the pub to watch the League One play-off final, so raced ahead and completed the walk – the entire walk – in less than an hour.
It was a packaged tour organised by HF Holidays, a co-operative set up as the Holiday Fellowship in 1913 by Thomas Arthur Leonard, a non-conformist social reformer. He wanted to save factory workers from the fleshpots of Blackpool by encouraging them to take walking holidays instead. A great believer in the improving effects of the great outdoors, he was a strong supporter of the National Trust and was also involved in setting up the Youth Hostel Association and the Ramblers’ Association – a bit like Robert Baden-Powell, except without the links to African colonialism or Hitler Youth. Leonard was also a supporter of the Independent Labour party, a staunch pacifist and, towards the end of his life, a member of the Society of Friends.
Not my cup of tea, then, but HF Holidays is now a broad enough church to accommodate sybaritic non-believers. Well, up to a point. I asked my mother-in-law if I could bring some wine, but was told this wouldn’t be in keeping with the slightly frugal, ascetic atmosphere. We were staying in an hotel in Alnmouth owned by the company, and meals were communal, with the 60 or so guests sharing tables and expected to chat to each other while selecting from a limited menu. The food wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, but breaking out a bottle of the good stuff – indeed, doing anything remotely flashy – would have been infra dig.
To underline the air of self-denial, each dish listed its calorie count, although the numbers may have been plucked out of the air. For instance, on the breakfast menu, a boiled egg had 52 calories, but a poached egg had 105. Surely poaching an egg doesn’t double the calories? On the other hand, if you added smoked haddock to your poached egg, it only brought the total up to 127, which must have been an underestimate. Not surprisingly, this latter combination proved very popular with the calorie-counting outdoorsmen.
Every evening before dinner, the guests were given a run-down of the walks on offer the following day, with ascending levels of difficulty. We chose number two on the first day – six-and-a-half miles, with some gentle hills – and number one on the second – four miles along a coastal path. The choices were accompanied by much speculation as to whether the person who’d calculated the distances was the same person who’d totted up the calories. Would six-and-a-half miles turn out to be ten? This wasn’t just a chance to poke gentle fun at the holiday company. The average age of the guests was about 75 and they didn’t want to risk keeling over. Happily, the guides explained that they would only move as quickly as the slowest person in the party, with plenty of loo breaks and coffee stops.
We went back to when the distinguishing characteristic of the British was fondness for taking the mickey
It turned out to be an enjoyable way to spend the bank holiday weekend. Not only is the scenery along the Northumberland coast spectacular – a bit like Cornwall without the crowds – but the other ramblers were excellent company. Most of them were quintessentially British, which is to say constantly making jokes about every-thing. We quickly formed little friendship groups and assigned each other stock roles from the back catalogue of classic English sitcoms. So, because I’d been anxious to make it to the play-off final, I was the football obsessive, a bit like Terry Collier in The Likely Lads. An old boy who was anxious about the loo breaks became Godfrey from Dad’s Army, while a bluestocking with a jolly-hockey-sticks air was Margo from The Good Life. I don’t mean we literally referred to each other by these names. Rather, we turned everyone into comic caricatures from the great pantomime that is our shared social history and then teased each other accordingly. It was like going back in time 25 years to when the distinguishing characteristic of the British was our fondness for taking the mickey. Now, of course, it’s our propensity to take offence.
I’m not sure I’ll be rushing to go on another HF Holiday in the next ten years, but when I hit my seventies and start worrying about staying active, I can think of worse ways to spend a long weekend. I’ll just have to work out a method of smuggling in some Gevrey-Chambertin, disguised as cold-pressed beetroot juice.
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