EVA'S HOLIDAY
My Kindle is dense with unread Brontë. All the sisters, all their clever books, all their 20-quid words and descriptions of moors, all there, making me feel guilty for reading a magazine. I'm on the train to Yorkshire and I'm filled with a certain kind of dread. It's the dread of the classroom. The dread of 8.45am, of entering an exam with a blunt pencil and nothing in your head but three seasons of Friends and a yearning for a Twix. I have tried (a bit) and failed (a lot) to love the Brontës, to learn about their history and work, yet I am on a pilgrimage to their last home like a Lady Gaga groupie on a long bus ride to Manhattan.
I could have been sent to Manhattan. I could have been sent to Cuba, to Rome, anywhere in the world. Instead Emma sent me to Yorkshire, on a drizzly morning soon after the floods. This is what happened: our editor, bearing in mind that Emma and I are very different, asked us to swap holidays. To write down where we'd like to go and what we'd like to do there, and then hand it over.
It was a cold day, and I hadn't been out for weeks – I wanted heat and I wanted a party, and I wanted one of those tall drinks that taste like a drunken childhood. I also wanted Emma to suffer, just a little. So I sent her to Ibiza. She would, I insisted, "spend her days on a beach in a bikini, reading books she's read before. Evening cocktails at Café del Mar, then a massive foam party. She would return with sunburn, a henna tattoo, perhaps, and quite a serious hangover." If offered drugs, I told her, she should seriously consider trying them.
My instructions from her were more detailed. They were 600 words long and included: "Also, there is this rare tour of the mausoleum, which I would DEFINITELY do."
I can't see your face as you read this, but rest assured mine looked like every emoticon mashed into one. We are very, very different. She was sending me to Yorkshire, on a trip in two halves. The first to Haworth, for the Brontë tourism, the second to Castle Howard, the stately home where the film and famous TV series Brideshead Revisited was set. Initially she wanted me to do it in a caravan. A caravan. Luckily winter, floods and my inability to drive made this impossible, so I found myself on the train to Halifax with my hungover friend Alice, the passive-aggressive Kindle, a copy of Wuthering Heights, and that sense of dread.
Chris Sutcliffe and his wife, Yorkshire TV presenter Christa Ackroyd, run a boutique bed and breakfast on the moors – they pick us up from the station and, driving down the narrow roads, the dales to our left, the moors to our right, they point out local landmarks of Brontë significance. Tonight we'll take part in one of their popular Brontë evenings – a talk from an expert, some history from Christa, a meal, drinks. People come from America to see where Charlotte and Emily (and Anne) walked and wrote.
Before we eat, though, we have to learn a bit. They take us to Haworth, through "Emily's moors", to see "Charlotte's post office", the post office Charlotte Brontë frequented, sending out her stories under pseudonyms. I'm more interested in the sprinkled mentions of Sylvia Plath, whose visit with Ted Hughes to Wuthering Heights (the abandoned farm of Top Withens is believed to be the inspiration) inspired poems from both. While different, hers and his both play on the bleakness of the moors. A bleakness absent in Haworth itself, where the town's stores are all staffed by people in ye olde fancy dress and there are more gift shops than cobbles.
Haworth is a beautiful Brontë theme park. And (we learn at the museum) the sisters have been an industry since they died, when their possessions were already so valuable that one fan shipped a window pane from the parsonage to Baltimore.
The view from the parsonage is a graveyard on a hill. But graveyards shouldn't be built on hills, they learned, after the graveyard started killing people who'd drunk water poisoned by the corpses.
Anyway – long story short, people are really into the Brontës. They encouraged us to stroke the post office counter, which we did. It was soft. And later, at Brook House's Brontë evening, Christa's historian presented us with a bit of stone from the actual Wuthering Heights, which, after a day immersed in the sisters and their work, was oddly moving.
That night, in the huge white bedroom, a bath at the foot of the bed, I tried reading it again, and fell asleep in minutes. This is what I learned: that the story of the Brontës is much more interesting than the Brontës's stories.
The next day we take a train to Malton and enter Castle Howard as dusk falls. A baroque mansion, built in 1,000 acres at the turn of the 17th century, it was designed by a playwright – the building is like a stage set. We pick through the rooms – one an exhibition about the rebuilding of a wing after a fire in wartime, another about the filming of Brideshead. A low point comes when Geoffrey, the oversized dragon mascot, hugs me from behind in the tearoom marquee, though it cheers Alice up wildly.
On the train home I eat a biscuit and think about how it felt to go on somebody else's holiday. There were moments when I felt like I was standing outside myself looking in. Looking in and taking the piss. Snorting at myself: "Spending your weekend walking quietly round a stately home! You're your own grandma!"
Other times, breathing in these ancient lives and the fine, clean, grassy air, I felt good and pure, like I was putting money into my health meter. Mainly though, I felt like a child taken somewhere against her will. It was liberating to be on holiday and have no choice.
Essentials
Eva stayed at Brook House B&B (brookhouseyorkshire.com), where double rooms cost from £85. Entry to the Brontë Parsonage Museum (bronte.org.uk) costs £7. Grounds-only entry to Castle Howard (castlehoward.co.uk) is £6 in low season. Rooms for two people sharing at the Talbot Hotel in Malton (talbotmalton.co.uk) cost from £99 including full English breakfast. Eva's train journey was provided by East Coast – fares from London to York or Leeds start at £26 (eastcoast.co.uk). For more information on places to visit and stay in Yorkshire, go to yorkshire.com
EMMA'S HOLIDAY
The Hotel Can Talaias, a few miles outside the tiny town of San Carlos, is about as remote as the tiny island of Ibiza gets. But that doesn't mean there's nothing to do. "There's a display of local crafts tomorrow," Anka the housekeeper tells us. "And there's the hippy market at Es Cana. Or you can drive to the world heritage site…" I start to make a mental schedule. Then I sigh, and remember that I shan't be seeing any of these things.
I have never taken a holiday that does not involve some sort of cultural self-betterment. I have never wanted to. I like history; I like learning stuff. Meanwhile Kate, my younger sister, who has often been dragged around museums and ruins on our holidays together, couldn't be more thrilled with Eva's stipulations that we must remain either by the pool or the sea. She grabs her towel and heads outside. "Anka says this was one of the first pools ever built in Ibiza!" she trills. "So at least you'll get some history…"
A rambling villa looking out over a valley of pines and an escarpment of olive groves, Can Talaias would normally house around 10 or more guests, but it's low season, so Kate and I have the sunbeds – and the honesty bar – to ourselves. I throw myself down under the noonday sun and begin to read urgently, an attempt to make the enforced idleness feel productive. Unfortunately Eva has insisted I take only books I've read before, so I don't have the satisfaction of ticking off new titles. I shift about restlessly. The Wi-Fi does not work. Does tanning count as multitasking? I glance at my watch: two hours gone; my sister has fallen asleep. Stalactites of anxiety stab my chest.
All I know of Ibiza has reached me in the stories of friends who had far more daring teenage lives than mine. So the quiet of the beaches, which we explore the next day, is a pleasant surprise – especially the Aigües Blanques, whose silky sand is covered in sunbeds, in turn covered in naked men and topless women of all shapes and sizes. We hire a couple for the day (sun loungers, not naked people), for a surprisingly considerable sum. I can't help thinking of the National Trust properties it would have got me in to.
Still, the temperature is perfect, and the longer I lie in the sun the less I feel inclined to move. The art of the daytime nap has always eluded me – so many other things you could be doing – but the background plashing sends me into a doze, a heavy-lidded anaesthesia full of happy fantasies, and I wonder groggily if this is what people mean by a relaxing holiday. Several hours later, when Kate suggests we return to the hotel, I'm surprised to discover that I feel disappointed. I have also fulfilled one of Eva's requirements: I am sunburnt.
One of my most unbending holiday rules is to fit in some high culture. Kate likes to do impressions of the bleak production of Peter Grimes I made her sit through at La Scala, on what was supposed to be a girly shopping trip to Milan – "Peter! Peter!" she moans operatically, still bitter to have given up three and half hours of Prosecco-drinking time. Here there's only one cultural outlet available to us, and Eva has told me she wouldn't dream of holidaying in the dance capital of the Mediterranean without spending at least one night at a club. So Kate and I head out for our night of raw hedonism in San Antonio, a 40-minute cab ride which, despite the pumping house music our aged driver is thoughtfully pumping through his stereo, is spent pinching each other awake.
Since Eva has been frank in her advocacy of stimulants, we begin our evening at a late-night café and demand the strongest coffee available. Falling in behind teens in nylon shirts and a teetarati of high-heeled women, we make our way to Es Paradis, only to discover that no one shows up at a club as dweebily early as midnight. For the next two hours we stare at an immense expanse of white dance floor as it gradually contracts with bodies. I nurse a painfully expensive G&T, waiting for the music and the alcohol to perform their irresistible chemistry.
It never does. When Kate and I finally force ourselves into position in front of the DJ, there's no room to do anything but jut our chins to the beat. I look at the blissed-out tribe around us, nodding their heads in agreement with the synthetic beeps and drones, and imagine myself transported like them. I'm trying to enjoy myself, I really am – at one stage Kate insists that I fold my arms, because my attempt to throw shapes is embarrassing her – but instead of losing myself to the music, it assaults my senses like a sugar headache; instead of feeling part of some throbbing, mystic whole, I've never been more acutely aware of the ache in the small of my back or the sharp tang of blisters on the balls of my feet.
On previous holidays, I've got excited about steam trains and visited a museum of farm equipment. It takes a lot to bore me, but three hours of repetitive, amelodic sounds will, apparently, do it. By 4am, nonsensical things have started to happen – a group of bare-nippled ladies on stage holding inflatable candles; a man drumming in full warrior costume – and I haven't even taken drugs.
Exhausted, numb, I wonder why someone who wanted a relaxing break would choose to ruin all their good work like this. I thought I knew Eva until I tried out her holiday; right now, I'm not sure I understand her at all.
Essentials
Emma stayed at the Hotel Can Talaias, where a double room costs from €150, including breakfast (hotelcantalaias.com). Her flight was provided by British Airways (britishairways.com), which flies to Ibiza from London City, Gatwick and Heathrow, from £75 one way. Car hire was provided by Ibiza Tourism (ibiza.travel)
