BOOK OF THE WEEK
THE GRAN TOUR
by Ben Aitken (Icon £14.99, 306 pp)
When Ben Aitken discovers that for £109 he can get a four-night coach trip to Scarborough, with a cooked breakfast every morning, three-course dinner every night and excursions to York and Whitby, his first thought is: ‘That’s how much my sister paid to get into a disco in Ibiza’.
His second thought is that, despite only being 33 and therefore half the age of the typical customer (he learned about the coach company from his grandmother), he’s going to book a place.
In fact, it’s not ‘despite’ his youth, it’s because of it. He wants to learn from his elders, who have ‘more grist in the mill’.
British author Ben Aitken, 33, shares his trips around the UK with pensioners in new book The Gran Tour (file image)
At first, the pensioners are confused by Aitken’s presence (one woman thinks he’s French: ‘You looked like someone who’d go on strike a lot’), but soon the generations are bonding. Dennis and Clem advise him not to pay extra for a sea view — ‘They did that once and felt like they couldn’t leave the room’.
Aitken helps Patrick with his eyedrops, after which the older man has to be carried downstairs for bingo: ‘I felt rather like a Roman emperor. That or a sofa.’ Pat says she owns a flat in Turkey, but when Aitken asks which part, ‘she says she doesn’t know, she doesn’t bother with geography’.
The trip itself is so rewarding that Aitken goes on another five.
The singer at the St Ives hotel sounds fun: ‘She’s straight into a joke about Viagra, then there’s an announcement she’ll be selling chutney after the show, and then it’s Single Ladies by Beyonce.’
Even the coach drivers are entertaining. The one in Killarney announces that Meghan and Harry have had a boy. ‘Ah, that’s nice, they say…“They’ve called it Gary.” Silence.’
Aitken seems the perfect kind of person for holidays such as this. ‘Call me easily pleased but, to my mind, there’s nothing like walking in a new town, with no plan other than to run an eye over the place.’
He likes his single bed: ‘I find the lack of options restful.’
And boy, can he write. Someone he meets in a pub is ‘a committed apostle of Malbec’. Contemplating the shared TV references that are vanishing in the age of YouTube, he says he ‘didn’t pursue the knowledge, it simply landed on me, like cultural shrapnel’.
Ben overheard one pensioner speak about removing her bra from underneath her blouse to throw over the wall into George Clooney’s (pictured) garden
The pen portraits of his fellow holidaymakers are wonderful, all the more so because Aitken leaves you to draw your own conclusions.
One man goes out of his way to boast that he has loved his wife ‘every minute since I met her. Not so much as a tea break.’ Later, Aitken notes how happy she looks when she’s away from him.
As for the dialogue, Aitken rivals Alan Bennett in the ear he has for an eavesdropped remark. ‘So in conclusion, Janet, I won’t be buying those crisps again.’ A woman tells of her brother dying after collapsing on a bus with a ruptured aneurysm: ‘And what’s more it was the wrong bloody bus.’
When Chris complains that her granddaughter comes over and just sits on the couch messaging her boyfriend, Carole mishears it as ‘massaging’.
In Lake Como, things get especially wild: ‘On our way back to the hotel, we stop outside George Clooney’s house. Jill is visibly and audibly excited — she even has a puff on her inhaler… Someone thinks they saw him through frosted glass — which means he was probably getting out of the shower.
Ben fell into a discussion about the afterlife during a trip to Llandudno with his grandmother (file image)
‘The very thought does something to Jill. I watch her inch closer to George’s perimeter. I watch her look over her shoulder to make sure a few people are looking.
‘And then I watch her remove her bra from under her blouse and fling it over the wall into George’s garden. I ask her what she did that for. She shrugs her shoulders and says: “Well, I’ve plenty of others.”
‘A mile or so down the road, with Jill’s knockers bouncing around like there’s no tomorrow, I ask if she’s got a bit of a thing for George then. She says not really, and that if she’s got a thing for anyone then it’s David Dimbleby. She even went to the filming of Question Time when it was in Telford, and again when it was in Shrewsbury. She was tempted to ask David a question.
‘I ask what she would have asked. “I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe if he fancied nine holes sometime.” David, if you’re reading — you’d have been a fool to say no.’
But while the oldies provide unintentional humour, Aitken is careful to never patronise them. His mission to learn is a genuine one.
THE GRAN TOUR by Ben Aitken (Icon £14.99, 306 pp)
On the Llandudno trip he’s accompanied by his grandmother, and they fall to discussing the afterlife. She’s not bothered either way: ‘I was dead for millions of years and I didn’t mind it one bit.’ I like the sound of her.
When Aitken was at university she sent him out-of-date food ‘to build up [his] immune system’.
In a less well-written book, the story of Gerry, who keeps his wife’s ashes in the boot of his car (whenever he finds somewhere he thinks she’d have liked, he scatters some of her there) would have been played just for comedy. In this book, it is genuinely moving.
Beneath it all, the most important story is Aitken’s own. He knows he occasionally drinks too much — hence getting locked out of the hotel in Scarborough and having to wake the night porter to let him back in.
Contemplating the salmon off the coast of Scotland (‘breeding then dying’), Aitken worries that perhaps it’s time for him and his girlfriend to think about children.
‘I’m caught with one leg in the playpen of youth, while the other’s desperate to stride ahead. I’m going to pull my groin at this rate.’ Sharon helps. ‘She says I’ll cheer up after I’ve had a bit of grief in my life.’
Aitken thinks about Japan, where broken vases are often pieced back together and the cracks emphasised with gilt, ‘and finally the broken thing is considered more beautiful than the unbroken thing’.
So yes, this book is a light-hearted travelogue, where Kitty gets cross with Monica in Pitlochry because she won’t do sambuca shots at lunchtime. But it’s so much more than that as well.
I really hope Aitken finds his way in life and that, one day, I’m reading his book about fatherhood.