He’s such a pessimist!

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My partner is an irredeemable pessimist. It has taken me years to really realise quite how bad he is, but our latest holiday really illustrated this attribute perfectly! He organised the bookings and had trouble finding any reasonable accommodation within the city for the dates we needed (as usual we were doing everything at the last minute – although this time at least we had a couple of days in hand – a few years ago we booked a holiday to Germany on the actual departure date, but that’s another story!) When he was struggling to find something suitable I suggested trying AirBnB. This is a system we never used before but I did stay at an AirBnB place on the trip to Paris with my friend Helen, when she organised a place for six of us to stay, and that worked out OK. So we found a small apartment that looked convenient and booked that. You don’t find out all the details, such as the exact address, until after you have booked, so he was convinced that we would find all sorts of onerous small print after we had already committed. Thankfully that didn’t seem to be the case. We walked from the nearest Metro station to the address we were given. We actually had to collect the key from somewhere a bit further away, but it made sense to get to the place first and then for the rest of us to wait with the luggage while my partner went to pick up the key, which was at a small hotel under some sort of key caretaking scheme. So he was given the key but never met the owner. He came back with the key and instructions that it was the left door on the second floor, in what was a typical European apartment building – double doors off the street leading to a passageway with mail boxes, then a door out again into a little courtyard with various doors leading to other staircases. So he and Little One went up the appropriate stairs to open the door. After a while they came back, flustered. The key wouldn’t open the door on the left and didn’t look as if it would open any other doors either. We took our cases up the stairs to have a look, and wondered if perhaps the ‘second floor’ actually meant the first floor, in the American way, so we went back down but those doors didn’t look promising either. The locks on other doors looked different, and we didn’t want to try them in case we were caught trying to ‘break in’ to someone else’s home! But the door of the apartment we thought it meant didn’t have any name or number or any other identifying marks to reassure us it was the right place. Anyway eventually I said I would have a try of the door we thought was the intended one. I put the key in the lock, turned it, and the door opened, no problem. So in we went and all seemed to be as it should be. The sofa-bed had been made up as requested. But then my partner thought they hadn’t given us enough towels. Then he couldn’t find any crockery except two bowls and some paper plates. Then there wasn’t any toilet paper. By this point he was stomping around cursing and shouting that things were going from bad to worse. What? I mean really, none of those things was all that terrible. He found some extra towels in a drawer. In the end we had more than we needed. The apartment had high ceilings and some cupboards were very high up. I found a step ladder and located a package of toilet rolls in the bedroom cupboard. Then I found a folding step stool in the little kitchen and found all the plates and bowls in the top cupboards there. It looked as though perhaps previous guests had also failed to locate them and had bought a packet of paper plates to use instead. After that things calmed down, thankfully. Honestly he is so determined that everything is going to go wrong that I find myself going to the opposite extreme and being unremittingly optimistic to offset the gloom! All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2024.