Croatia: Spellbinding. Intoxicating. Hysteria-inducing.

In September, I went on holiday with my friend Daisy. It was a fun trip, so I thought you might like to hear the highlights. I’ve been trying to write the opening paragraph. My notes read as follows:

Punched in neck. Larry Grayson. Wine under fluorescent strip-lighting. Leaky shampoo.

Hmm. I’m suddenly concerned that the trip might have been more traumatic than I recall. Especially given that all this happened before the plane took off.

The plan had been simple. Take backpacks to show everyone how young and intrepid we are. Get to the airport nice and early to smugly enjoy over-priced pre-holiday we-deserve-this drinks.

The reality had not quite lived up to this. During their affectionate farewell at the train station, Daisy’s boyfriend somehow punched her in the neck. The check-in man had inexplicably felt the need to say, ‘Shut that door,’ a reference both Daisy and I were mortified to be old enough to recognise. The ridiculous queues at both Security and the Terminal 2 bar were so upsetting we ended up knocking back vile white wine under the oppressive glare of canteen lighting at the airport equivalent of a truck-stop. And the less said about the toiletry explosion in my luggage the better.

Not the most auspicious of beginnings to our adventure. Positively rocky, you might say. Don’t worry; it picks up later on.

We started with a few days on Korčula, a beautifully picturesque island off the Dalmatian coast, followed by a 3-night sojourn in Dubrovnik. Let’s start with Korčula. First, the history. Marco Polo might have come from there. Well, he definitely visited once, and there is a family named Polo who have lived there for years. And apparently, that's proof enough.

And now the culture. Korčula Old Town is a mini-Dubrovnik. We wandered the narrow streets, marvelling at the stunning buildings of butter-coloured stone. We swam in the clear calm waters of the Adriatic. One evening, we climbed up an erstwhile wartime lookout tower that now serves great cocktails. Oh, and then Daisy fell off a commemorative cannon.

The next day we got caught in an almighty downpour over lunch. Naturally, we did what any self-respecting Brits would do, pretended it wasn’t raining and carried on eating. It’s a shame we didn’t notice our guidebook swimming in a nearby puddle. The pristine guidebook Daisy had been lent by a kindly old professor colleague. I can only imagine his pained wince when she returned it to him.

And then on to Dubrovnik. Ah, Dubrovnik. If you haven’t been, go. It’s great. There is seafood. There were peacocks. Ice-creams are apparently bigger there than anywhere else. In the evenings, live music plays in the square, inspiring couples to spontaneously begin dancing. One night we were taking a turn around the port and were delighted to hear some kind of male-voice choir taking advantage of the acoustics inside an old stone bastion to sing Croatian folk songs. We rounded the corner to find the a capella group was made up of youths in hoodies, bewitching an audience of middle-aged tourists. A magical moment.

And that’s the thing. Croatia was full of incredible enchanting moments. We were sipping prosecco one afternoon at a bar ingeniously carved into the rocky walls of the city, taking in the sunset and watching dolphins plashing in the sea below. Daisy was so overwhelmed she proposed to me. Well someone should, she said. It feels like the thing to do.

It was an idyllic week, albeit one that occasionally seemed to be masquerading as a farcical comedy of errors. I leave you with the final episode of our adventure. We called on the owner of our rented apartment to return the key. A mysterious character, she seemed to spend her days chain-smoking, incessantly laundering towels and buying up Smurfs 2 merchandise for her grandchildren. Unexpectedly, she invited us in to try a cake she had made.

Ooh, what kind? asked Daisy, politely. You will see, she muttered darkly. And see we did. It was rum cake. Or Rhum Cake, as I prefer to imagine it spelled in Croatian. And more rum than cake, if you ask me. British to the end, Daisy and I both studiously powered our way through the rum-soaked confection that resembled flammable custard more than anything else. And then happily tripped off to catch the bus to the airport, slightly drunk and inadvertently interrupting someone’s wedding photographs on the way. Sounds about right.

Festival-Going for Dummies

A year ago, my friend Daisy and I intrepidly set off for our first ever festival. Our adventures that weekend were many and varied. Here are a few of the highlights…

We started the weekend exuberant and entirely undaunted by our hideous lack of preparation (we had borrowed a brand-new tent that neither of us knew how to put up, and thought that packing plastic beakers made us smug camping geniuses).

Somewhere up the M6, however, we started to doubt the extent of our camping prowess. Or rather, we began to panic that we were going to be crap at dealing with multiple consecutive hangovers without duvets and fish finger sandwiches.

As if to confirm our naivety, upon arrival at the camp-site we found ourselves surrounded by people unloading thousands of cases of lager. Rather dolefully, we surveyed our own sensible camping provisions: 3 small-looking bottles of Strongbow, bananas, maltloaf and a packet of Sport biscuits (nothing chocolate-covered; it could potentially melt and spoil). It looked like we were off on a smuggler-catching expedition with the Famous Five.

And so, in the interest of saving you any festival-related faux pas, here are a few things you probably don’t want to do:

·         Don’t take a trolley that’s blatantly designed to work only on flat man-made surfaces. It will give up and collapse at the least suggestion of a hill. You will then attempt to fix it with a Kirby grip, which will undoubtedly fail, and then you’ll be stuck carrying the bastard thing in addition to all your other stuff.

·         Don’t do drugs, kids. But if you do, at least try and be cool about it. Our friend brought along a couple of pre-rolled joints for the weekend, took one look at the sniffer dog at the ticket-barrier and freaked right out. It took a panic phone-call to her boyfriend, where he calmly explained that we were far too middle-class to get into any serious trouble, before we dared go any further. And God bless the knobheads with a wheelie-bin full of something much more illicit which sent the sniffer dog completely berserk, thus enabling us to swan casually past.

·         Don’t get as far as the actual camping-area, only to realise you can’t bag a suitable spot for your tent, given that you’ve never put it up before and have no idea how much surface area it requires.

At this point, Daisy and I were fairly close to losing it. What on earth did we think we were doing? We were completely clueless camping morons. We were going to die out here, huddled and shelterless in the dark. Either that, or we were going to stab each other to death with tent-pegs within 30 minutes. No, no, I exaggerate. In true British fashion, we sat down, took deep breaths, and had an emergency picnic to calm down. It consisted of decidedly non-cool cous-cous, satay chicken and a baguette.

By the time we had finished we were much more relaxed. And more importantly, our friends Claire and Laura (much more au fait with tents) had turned up and taken charge, laying out groundsheets and acquiring a Cath Kidston flowery mallet within seconds of arriving. Excellent.

Within the hour, tents were up, sunscreen had been applied and cider cracked open. And as it turned out, we were total naturals at the whole festival thing.

Well, almost. There was a strange moment the next morning when, elated at surviving our first night, Daisy and I somehow found ourselves sitting in an Alpro Soya-sponsored ball-pool fashioned to look like a cereal bowl, bewildered yet obedient, shouting the words ‘Plant Goodness’ to a hidden camera in order to receive some free granola. Weird.

By Saturday night, we were drinking cider in a field, branded with temporary tattoos depicting anchors and Hula girls. We were wearing mental false-eyelashes as our contribution to Fancy Dress (the theme was something about animals and machines, but who the hell cares). We were listening to live music, played by a man with a hat and a beard, in a tent that looked like a library. We had enthusiastically and unreservedly located our collective festival-going mojos.

By the end of the weekend, we were experts in creating the illusion of having showered, using only dry shampoo and baby wipes. We had made some friends (the man who had a hat EXACTLY like Claire’s, the dude in the tent near ours who lent Daisy some Lurpak for her Soreen).

I do not doubt that even a slight shower would have broken my spirit irrevocably. But we had hot, sunshiney weather for 3 whole days. Which allowed us to lie around saying wanky hippyish things about Nature, and finding ourselves, and realising what Life is really all about.

So by all means, and at least once in your life, do it; go, be free, be a festival-goer. It’s great.

And at all costs, take plastic beakers. They make excellent vessels for mixing Cider & Black, and they come in really handy for brushing your teeth.