I miss a lot of things about the real world: coffee, pastries, picking up things and smelling them, buying nail varnish, putting my forehead on a restaurant table when someone tells me a terrible story about the man they’re seeing, trying on hats. However, I don’t think I miss anything as much as I miss women. God, I miss women. I love my boyfriend and I’m routinely amazed at how well we’re doing at pretty much exclusively seeing one another, but I miss the physical presence of women with a dull ache that sits at the centre of my chest.
I miss the long dinners, the nights-out, and the nights-in spent slumped on one another re-watching Sex and the City. Moreover, I miss the very specific energy that comes with spending a lot of time together in an exclusively female group. I miss the comfortable silliness of ‘Holidays With The Girls’, and I have spent the majority of my days bookmarking the adventures we’re going to go on once this is all over. There are so many women I want to go away with, and various kinds of holidays I want to experience with them.
The One We Do Every Year
Every year, around July, my friends and I fly to Perpignan and drive 90 minutes to Arles-sur-Tech, a tiny region nestled in Northern Catalonia. When we drive, we constantly dip in and out of Spain and France; when we’re at home, we are consistently balancing delicacies and savagery. We indulge in skinny-dipping in the river, an image that would be far more erotic if we weren’t wearing Crocs and riding pool noodles. We prepare elaborate meals while donning gauzy, Sofia Coppola-style outfits, then spend the majority of the evening eating slices of ham with our bare hands. Long afternoons of quiet reading are followed by bursts of running around the garden appendages bare. This will be the first summer in a long time that we haven’t indulged ourselves in this strange orgy of female comforts, and I already mourn the witchy energy that my year will lose because of it. As soon as lockdown lifts: Perpignan, I’m on my way.
The One To Cement The Friendship
I have a friend who my boyfriend has dubbed my “Bad Influence Friend.” We have not been friends very long, but we’ve fallen into it like a couple of teenagers: we find one another hysterically funny, we communicate on the phone for hours, and we’re unable to meet each other without becoming a little tipsy. It represents the kind of friendship you build when you’re 18. Therefore, I want to have the kind of holiday reminiscent of my youthful days.
I envision renting a tiny self-catered apartment in Corfu, where all the windows feature heavy shop shutters, allowing for the deepest, darkest, most sweat-drenched hungover sleeps of nostalgia. I long for a small balcony to chain-smoke on. I wish for a dinner plate to re-christen as an ashtray. Moreover, I desire a huge, fun-oriented nightclub that lies a mile and a half from our accommodation, a place where we take a taxi at midnight and walk home at 5 am, freezing and jacketless, wading into the sea. I want to read Maeve Binchy books in a still-wet bikini, with a half-empty beer stuck in the sand and a massive bag of Lays crisps between us. I hope my bad influence friend remains my companion for years, and I want this holiday as glittering proof of our delightful yet troublesome impact on one another.
The One We’ve Been Dreaming About For Years
Neither Ella, Tash, nor I have spent much time with horses in the last decade, but we spent our childhoods devoted to various forms of HorseGirlism. The only cure for a Horse Girl is exposure therapy: if you wish to cure your daughter of the affliction, you must encourage her to work for free at a local stable every Saturday or, even better, buy her a pony to grow resentful of. If you are never fortunate enough to receive such a remedy, you continue to embody a Horse Girl forever. This is the state my friends and I frequently find ourselves in. For a long time, we have been planning a week-long vacation with HorseXplore, a riding holiday company whose website I find so pleasing that I often visit merely to relax. I will spend hours scrolling through various horse vacations, reading testimonials, and sending my friends links to riding experiences in Iceland, Bulgaria, and Mexico. I’ll text notes like “this one is ideal for beginners!” and “this horse appears friendly!” while asking “what’s everyone doing in April!?” This September, we had planned to embark on a week-long trek of the Balkan mountains in Bulgaria – unfortunately, this will not be feasible now. Watch out 2021, for I will be pony trekking into you!
