Fordyce Maxwell - 'The advantages of not going abroad? No airports is number 1 – and 2 and 3'

Published on Saturday 12 July 2008 19:43

FRIENDS used to ask our advice on holidays. Because of our disastrous record they wanted to know where we were going and when so that they could avoid it.

There was the week trapped by floods in Puerto Pollensa as trees bent double in the gale. The 11 days in Majorca when the sun shone once, we were the only family ever in the pool and Tom got hypothermia. Or the Vendee fortnight of flooded tent and digging beach foxholes to avoid sandblasting.

More recently our luck has turned and our family week at St Monans earlier this month could be the best week of this so-called summer. It wis braw.

Sitting on the terrace of the Seafood Restaurant, temperature in the 20s, sun on deep blue water, the Bass Rock in view, reflecting on the kind of oysters and monkfish every Scottish restaurant should produce and so few do, celebrating our son-in-law's new job, it was hard to think of anywhere we would rather have been.

There are other advantages in not going abroad. "No airports" is number one. It is also number two and number three. Taking all you need in a car is so much easier. Coping – even if as grandparents we only do the best bits – with four-month-old Ebba is easier.

Language is less of a problem, although a chat with a local fisherman about haddock tested that theory as we got about one word in three. But we understood enough to know we were buying quality for home cooking. And apart from the Seafood Restaurant, twice, let's not forget those fish suppers.

Food figures large on a self-catering holiday and we enjoyed it all. Everything we bought was fresh and good quality, from the Ardross farm shop steaks and broccoli to rolls from the friendliest Spar I've ever been in.

Not that we ate all the time. Not quite. There were pre-breakfast strolls, walks to the windmill, reading in the sunshine and time spent watching youngsters making their own fun by jumping repeatedly into the harbour.

We walked to Elie and Kilconquhar – I know, say Kinnyeuchar – and I was probably the best-supported walker ever to take the coastal path from St Monans to Crail, met every mile or so by Team Maxwell with fresh supplies and a smile from Ebba.

One sun-baked afternoon we played 36 holes at St Andrews for 2 – a putting green is still good value – and tracked down Scotland's Secret Bunker via a circuitous route or, as we might say, a wrong turn or two.

Making our own fun, I won the stub-your-toe-most-often-in-a-strange-house contest while Liz won for most deft handling of an incontinent teapot.

But on the last morning we walked to the kirk, claimed as the closest to the sea in Scotland, with its reminder that coastal village life was not always about good food and morning rolls for visitors, the sea not always blue, the sun always shining.

It is the story of November 1875 when five boats from St Monans went down; 37 men died; 72 children were orphaned; one woman alone lost a husband, two sons, two brothers, three nephews and a brother-in-law. Who would grumble about the price of fish?