My five favourite vacations with Sylvia Hermann
5x5 This Sunday, October 16, would have been Sylvia Hermann’s 42nd birthday. It’s a date she enjoyed filling with friends and fun even more than she did most of the time.
I don’t know if all widows feel this, but sometimes it feels like the person I’ve lost has died twice. There’s the physical death, but then there’s the slow loss of her presence in your life, in so many ways. There’s a time when people stop talking about your lost friend. At first it makes sense because it’s too raw, too complicated, too wounding to remember. Maybe they don’t want to suffer, or maybe they don’t want your scabs to turn into scars. But without repetition, later on it feels like the memories of her are being buried as surely as her body.
So as much as it’s healthy to move on with my life, I wanted to spend a week of 5x5 celebrating Sylvi’s life and the happiness it brought. It’s Travel Tuesday, and holidays were a big part of our life. We went on so many holidays that I honestly can’t remember them all, but here are five trips and destinations that I’ll always connect to our time together.
1 Venice Sylvia was always good at doing the unexpected, and our first ever getaway was a surprise weekend trip to Venice. A hotel on the Lido, where she danced in a fountain at 3am, drinking too much Guinness in some strange little bar, discovering that we both had a finite appetite for museums and shared a dislike of being steered in tourist trap shopping situations.
Years later, we returned in a little more luxury for an awards dinner connected to my work. I went barefoot over the cobbles after the event so she could wear my flat shoes instead of her heels, we bought prosecco at 3am and visited the international architectural biennale.
2 Barbados Our holiday in Barbados was a ray of light in a shitty final year. Four days after Sylvia’s stroke in May 2014, she told me to check out this British Airways competition at Victoria station on my way home to her. Channelling years of wasted video game experience, I won us a pair of flights to Barbados, and we went in December.
She’d recovered from most of her stroke, and was still beginning to suffer the condition which really brought her low. But as ever, the sunshine and warmth improved her arthritis, and we took it slow, buzzing around the island in a rented jeep, lazing on the beach or by the pool, snorkelling, drinking duty free spirits and cheap local beer, having barbecues and watching movies on the balcony of our flat. And going on a submarine!
3 Paris Sylvi and I went to Paris three times: it’s another early getaway in our relationship, by Eurostar (so exciting in the 1990s) to a little hotel somewhere near Gare du Nord, thankfully just south of the red light district! Somehow we missed the Louvre, but we saw the Eiffel Tower and much more, as well as sampling at least one amazing bloody steak, fast food with beer, and beaucoup du vin.
The second was with her colleagues from Ove Arup — Alessandra, Rebecca, Kalpana and Osan. The trip was cunningly part-funded by Arup in exchange for a presentation on their return (those heady days before the crash), and we took in the Pompidou, Versailles and the Tuileries. There was probably more, but that’s what I recall.
Paris was also our last international destination. We booked a Eurostar day-trip/coach tour, although it turned out to be a weird weekend after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Sylvi wasn’t too well and it was chilly, but we had a memorable dinner in the Eiffel Tower, a boat trip down the Seine, and we finally got to the Louvre (which was unexpectedly quiet, so you could actually see the Mona Lisa).
4 New Year’s Eve For as long as I can remember, we always spent our NYE somewhere different, often with friends and never in the same place twice. Edinburgh, Bristol, Cardiff, Brussels, Berlin, Valencia, Madrid, Rome, Budapest, Munich, Dublin…there‘s enough to fill their own 5x5 one day (probably near the end of the year).
They peaked in the Noughties, with a fun-loving group from Abraham Consulting (though thankfully never the boss). It was usually a counterpoint to the summer Glastonbury trip we made working with Mike, Gill and Jonathan, joined by Amanda, Ed and others. They were always full of unpredictable fun as we followed the local traditions and visited random drinkeries.
Our last New Year turned out to be our first in Peckham, making a last minute trip to Beer Rebellion on Queen’s Road because Sylvi was too tired for a full night out. Sipping beer in the warm, we were treated to an unexpectedly hilarious display of shit fireworks from the flats opposite.
5 Roadtrips I’ve mentioned them before, but where long journeys can be a nightmare for some couples, they were often a lot of fun for us. Long chats between and around music and podcasts, stopping at random places, but somewhere different almost every night. Sometimes it was just the two of us, at others there was a group to catch up with.
We didn’t just take road trips to uncivilized backwaters like North Africa and New Jersey, but through France, Spain, Massachusetts, Belgium and the Netherlands, around Italy and across Scandinavia. We competitively made packed lunches on the dashboard of an Austin Allegro and bumped through the third world potholes of Manhattan. There was tension sometimes, and disagreements, but there was laughter too, and it was always resolved by the promise of something new along the road.
I’d like to think that’s how our relationship worked as well. We always looked for a new adventure that would give us shared experiences and something to talk about.
