Holiday snaps: Carcassonne 2009

To take beautiful photos of your partner on holiday, ideally, you need two things. First, the sun needs to be shining and secondly, they need to smile. By the time the sun came out in Carcassonne, the smiles had left for good but because the sun had been so thin on the ground I took the photo anyway.

It was on our last full day in the city, by which time we were just wondering when we could go home. It had started out so promising; my mother, my stepfather, Kelly and I staying in the hotel at the airport the night before our flight, excited and happy about our trip away together. Even now I don’t completely understand how it all went so badly wrong in four short days.

The rain didn’t help. It started the day we arrived and it pretty much didn’t stop. At first it was funny, as we sheltered in cafes and waited for it to blow over, but it never did. It was the shape of things to come; a lot of what came out of that trip didn’t blow over. Of course, it wasn’t so bad for my mother and stepfather because they had come prepared - head to toe in waterproofs, they were ready for everything. With their bulky backpacks they were like nylon and neoprene snails, and I can still hear the smug, reproachful whiff, whiff, whiff of their trousers even now.

We walked along the battlements of the old city, lashed with rain, dodging through puddles, waiting for the moments when it would subside enough for our cameras safely to come out, and we pretended we were having fun in spite of it. I don’t know if they were convinced; I know we weren’t. My umbrella was nearly turned inside out, along with everything else.

On something like the second day, my stepfather had had enough and decided he wanted to take a flight home. We on the other hand, desperate to rescue the situation, decided we could take a train to Toulouse. I had no idea what Toulouse was like but at least we would be soaked somewhere new and besides, it might have shops. My stepfather decided he would sooner stay behind, so Kelly and I walked to the station, checked the trains and tried to decipher the timetables - only to discover that it would cost a small fortune to get there on a tariff we didn’t understand.

So we were thwarted and I learned another new thing; it’s hard to spend a day with people when you’ve recently declared that you’d rather be in a different city to them, especially when they’ve recently declared that they’d rather be in a different country.

There’s not a lot to do in Carcassonne when it rains. With hindsight, we should have just retired to the hotel room with a novel and written it off, but with hindsight we shouldn’t have gone at all. Instead, we carried on spending time together, like picking at a scab. We sometimes went our separate ways in the daytime but we always made sure we met up for dinner, an occasion designed to showcase our glaring incompatibilities. Them: into simple, hearty food, moderate eaters, teetotallers. The standard fare of the Languedoc - meat and lentils and beans - was right up their street. Us: fond of fine dining, big portions, a bottle of red with every meal. “Didn’t you do well finishing all of that?” my mother would say at the end of courses. You fat sods, the subtitles would flash at the bottom of the screen.

On our last night Kelly and I deliberately chose the finest restaurant in town. We enjoyed a five course seasonal menu in a tasteful, sparsely populated dining room with the same awful record by Seal on repeat throughout. Each course was delicate, pretty and miniature. If I remember rightly my mother and stepfather passed on the cheese course - it was all just too much - so we ate theirs with no shame at all. Things had got so bad that a part of our pleasure was their discomfort: food as revenge.

At first I thought the deep red room was formal and slightly sterile, but then came the horrible moment when I realised it was us.

Not that things hadn’t started to get niggly long before then. My stepfather, a keen photographer, took a fraction of the pictures we did but every one was stunning. Carefully set up, beautifully framed, tripod in place, he paid painstaking attention to everything. On the walk up to the south gate of the city, up the long hill towards the battlements, he would stop to get his equipment out and Kelly would dash in front, snap away on her point and shoot and say “It’s all right, we can move on now, I’ve taken the perfect photo of that.” It was childish and mean; funny, too, but a week before the prospect of being that spiteful would have been unthinkable.

At the very end - of the holiday and of something else - we touched down in Stansted Airport, early in the morning, and went to Pret for breakfast, just as we had at the start of the holiday, because it seemed like the right thing to do. But everything was spent. We just sat there waiting for it to be over so we could be sealed in the bubble of our own cars and start talking about what an awful time we’d had.

So the sun didn’t come out very often, and Kelly smiled less often still, but in any case there was a moment when the rain stopped and the clouds cleared and you got a momentary vision of what should have been: what the city should have looked like in summer, the ancient stone walls glowing and shining rather than damp and grim. You could imagine the hordes of satisfied tourists sitting in the square and drinking rosé, and an accordion player filling the air with notes. You could see why people came here, and why we came here. So I took the photo while I could, because it was the best it was going to get. But it was far, far too late to imagine how that holiday should have been.