The Gran Tour by Ben Aitken

I picked this up because I know all about Shearings coach tours. I have travelled on Shearings or Wallace Arnold buses to the very places described by Ben Aitken, and I recognise almost every type of scenario he shares with us.

I was in my early forties when we started booking Shearings holidays after we came across a brochure and couldn't believe how cheaply we could get all round Ireland or through Europe to Rome. The vast majority of our fellow travelers had a good twenty or thirty years on us, but we had just become grandparents, so we felt we qualified.

Ben seems like a nice young man, and he is careful not to make fun of his coach mates, but then he doesn't have to as they do that for themselves. You really do meet some characters on a coach trip, but they are generally harmless, and a bond forms amongst the group as soon as you board the bus. The drivers are the most tolerant people on the planet, and repeat everything they said about what time to be back at the bus to almost everyone who takes his hand to get down from the big step at the front. As Ben found, drivers share funny stories over the microphone and offer their own version of geography and history lessons about the areas the bus is whizzing through, and it isn't long before they become heroes to their captive audience.

Young Ben covers six tours for the book, so he certainly immersed himself as fully as he could into the culture and he takes his girlfriend Megan on one, and his Nan Janet on another, but mostly he travels on his own and takes his chances with whoever he has to sit next to. As soon as they stop, he gets to chatting with as many people as he can and its surprising how quickly elderly folk unburden themselves of the big things going on in their lives. If someone has been widowed, they get that information in up front and then move on to their medical history and then what their children or grandchildren are up to. If you let old people speak they tell you all sorts of fascinating things, and quite a lot to make you laugh, and it's no surprise that this book sold as well as it did.

I've moved up a generation since we last went on a Shearings holiday, and I claim my pension this year then a month later we will be staying at the Shearings hotel in Llandudno. This time we will fit in just nicely as my husband is over seventy and we are great grand parents now so maybe any young people we meet will treat us as subjects a social anthropology project - or a funny book they may be writing!

Comments

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