Anticipation is one of life's great pleasures. A coming event, a promised visit, an expected guest. But anticipations get thinner as you get older: fewer career moves to expect; friends scattered or infirm; performances of music or theatre not, perhaps as good as once they were, or seem so in memory.
But that makes expectation all the sweeter, and no month does it for me more than July. It's the coming of the formal holiday - other people's as well as my own - that somehow puts a glow in the air, a sheen of covert excitement. Even now, when people, especially the old, holiday all year round, the prospect of "the summer holidays" has a unique charge of specialness left over from the almost voluptuous eagerness of childhood.
My mother always began packing a month before departure. The family trunk was fetched from the attic and set out, open, on the floor of the front room (front rooms not being used except for visitors). Each day another offering was placed within its floral lining: a dress newly starched; the wrapped package of a shoe; the rubbery bulk of waterwings. Slowly the lower deck would fill, then the second shelf was put in place. As days went by there would be washing and ironing at all hours because we needed to take all the clothes we possessed. Finally, in the week before we travelled, the trunk would be roped and labelled, and carted off on a lorry to the railway station. It would arrive a day ahead of us, deposited into the care of some frumpy boarding house in a side street off the promenade to await our arrival. All this for two weeks in Blackpool, an hour away by train. But I have never known excitement like it.
Nowadays plenty of us travel often and with little fuss. Or rather the fuss has transferred elsewhere: the drawn-out tension of a month's packing becomes the hours-long wait at the airport, on the brink of anticipated pleasures. Yet the cache of air tickets with their tags and advice isn't the equal of the floral-lined trunk of my childhood. Today, travel is as much the norm as staying at home. Once it had the quality of something special. People wished you goodbye, good luck, don't forget to write, bring back a souvenir. Today it's hardly worth remarking. Mobile phones and text messaging keep people as locked in personal contact as they are every day. There's none of the rarity of separation that allows a cooler look. Separation is just not being in the same room.
And the old are travelling as never before. I am sent brochures for cruise liners, lecture tours of Greek islands, walking holidays - not too strenuous - in the foothills of the Pyrenees, all clearly targeted at the retired and able-bodied who want to catch up on the places they have missed so far. Sun and sea are for younger spirits. We're on the highways of life, never the same place twice, otherwise how will we ever see it all? Those of fainter heart - or frailer strength - have by now found their hotel of choice and go there regularly to be greeted as old friends by the patron and his family.
Yet not everything about this new world of travel caters for the old. Once there were kindly porters at railway stations and trolleys you didn't need to pay for. Now you hump your own or lose your coins in trolley slots that never pay you back. Whoever invented wheels on luggage is a hero to the old. But you still have to heave it all on and off carousels and trundle it miles through Heathrow's labyrinthine route to the Jubilee line.
Now comes a bright new idea from easyJet who are removing all weight restrictions on hand baggage. This is some relief as my on-board luggage is usually excessively loaded with books and shoes. However, there's a caveat: you must be able to lift your bag safely into the overhead locker by yourself, without assistance. They spell it out as brutally as that. It's something I haven't done for years, relying as I do on the kindness of strangers to help me out.
The distinction has to be drawn here between "Oh dear, please help me, I'm a weak and feeble woman" - an attitude we denounced with the arrival of 60s feminism - and the genuine plight of an old biddy who hasn't the muscle strength to lift her own luggage. So give us a break, easyJet. You should be training your stewards and encouraging your passengers to help out the old. Then when we disembark at Ibiza or Bilboa, Faro or Naples we will be fresh as daisies and as eager as the young to enjoy every minute.
