If there is one thing I like more than a minibreak, it is a day trip. With a day trip you are home before you know it, there’s an escape route built in, and although out on a limb geographically you can feel surprisingly at home. Are there three better words than “cheap day return”? And you don’t even have to contemplate a hideous hotel bedspread that might put the fear of God in you.

It seems to me that bedspreads make more of a difference to the feel of a hotel guest room than almost any other element. The view can be terrific, the curtains tip-top, there can be a china box of chocolates on the nightstand that is refilled every night, but if the bedspread is burgundy, mustard, rust or magenta, who can endure it? Even if we practise or preach what Chelsea Clinton calls the “discipline of gratitude”, a baronial-style bedspread can quite easily threaten to ruin things, sleep included. You can be brave about it, sure, but being brave is a function of ordinary time and has no business being part of your holiday experience.

Marseille bedspread

Because bedspread disappointment has often been a holiday feature for me, I sometimes wonder about travelling with one, a nice French white bedcover from a couple of centuries ago, a Marseille bedspread with raised white embroidery, faintly floral, that would enhance any setting and make you feel like a heroine in a very well-written novel.

So, I was in Brighton with a little girl in her late eights. The sun was shining. We had blue and white clothes on and a word search and a bag of toffees to share. I wanted to loll on the beach, although pebbles and lolling do not go hand in hand. I wanted to stroll on the pier and triumph at the Dolphin Derby and congratulate myself that my early obsession-slash-addiction to fruit machines is almost entirely at a close. For when I was the little girl’s age, I would have bet our house in those arcades if I could have inserted it virtually into the change machine and have it come blasting out in 10-pence pieces ready to be fed into anything with flashing lights, a hi-lo button and a nudge feature.

We had some vinegary cockles sitting on a bench, using wooden cocktail sticks to spear them, clutching the plush dolphin we had won who was called Bananas. (It said so on the label.)

After lunch, the little girl, somewhat unpredictably, wanted to see And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie at the Theatre Royal. We got a couple of tickets in the stalls and took our seats. In this play, 10 holidaymakers are invited to a guest house on an island in Devon by an eccentric millionaire whom none of them have met. They eat quite a bit of tinned jellied tongue, change their clothes for dinner and one by one most of them are murdered.

Disembodied recording

There was the glamorous secretary in a devilishly low-backed evening gown. There was the imperious judge, the idiotic dangerous-driving young toff, the highly strung doctor, a bit too fond of the old drink. There was a severe matron, scandalised by the very words “two-piece swimsuit”. There was the housekeeper in frilly polka dots and her touching husband Rogers. You get the picture. All had been guilty of, or partially responsible for, the deaths of others in their lives and this fact was broadcast to the rest of the guests on the first evening, via a disembodied recording.

Now, I have been on some bad holidays. I have been insulted in gondolas, had four-day food poisoning in the Lake District, been wrongly accused of shoplifting in a French supermarket. I have even stayed with people who made an entry in a notebook every time I ate a biscuit. But I have never regaled my guests with their past crimes or character flaws; I have never killed anyone or had any of my guests assassinated; I haven’t even served tinned tongue. Nowhere near.

Maybe I am far better at holidaying than I thought. I just haven’t been comparing myself with the right people.

As we took the train home it was a cheering thought.

— Financial Times