Country life
Travellers' tips
Leanda de Lisle
Those few spare moments when I haven't been listening to yet another India buff telling me that I must visit the tomb at dawn, when it's looking at its best, have been taken up by other travel preparations. The nurse who had declined to give me my hepatitis jab until I got over my cold finally relented, but unfortunately she left it so late that it won't be effective until after I get back from India. Still, at least I'll be covered when I next visit London, where my mother caught hepatitis a decade ago. Nurse was also kind enough to give me my malaria tablets. There are, as far as I can gather, two kinds: those that drive you mad and those that don't work. As I haven't been wearing my Napoleon hat recently (I save it for weddings) I assume I was given the latter, so I've invested in some powerful insect repellent as well.
I do enjoy packing all those little things that can save the day in some distant hotel: torches, Swiss army knives, cotton sleeping- bags,. bath-plugs. It makes me feel as though I'm going on some great adventure, although actually, like the hepatitis jab, these items are just as useful if you are travelling in England. A torch, for example, is a great blessing when you find yourself wandering the dark corridors of a country house, looking for the only bathroom on the third floor. Swiss army knives can help you open a bedroom window that has been glued shut since it was painted 20 years before. A cotton sleeping-bag could have spared me the grazed knees I acquired slip- ping in between the rough bed sheets of a certain London pied a terre. While those of our guests who uncomplainingly put up with a plugless bath will be relieved to hear that the situation has been rectified by a seasoned traveller (my mother), who left us the spare, rubber stop that she always keeps in her sponge-bag.
Rather less fun than all the Boy Scout preparations has been the search for some suitable holiday clothes. My summer things seem to have disintegrated under the weight of the cable-knit jumpers and heavy cords I spend most of the year in. So I've been traipsing round the local shops, look- ing for something 'out of Africa' that would look chic in India. However, as we don't yet have a Harvey Nichols, the only warm- weather clothing I've seen are the drippy dresses in sludge colours that Principles and Marks and Spencer failed to shift in their summer sales but are hoping to offload in their January ones. Retailers seem to believe that women • in the provinces want clothes that don't date — that is, clothes that are so dull and awful they never have been and never will be fashionable. At the top end of the market, we are sold navy blue cardigans with gilt buttons and matching skirts, and at the bot- tom those long, greying shifts. It's a choice between Miss Moneypenny and the work- house.
Happily, I can look forward to buying something prettier in India, although the danger is that I'll end up looking identical to every other Market Bosworth Mem- sahib, in a bright silk suit and pearl choker. Just as I will certainly come back to give you another tweedy Englishwoman's per- spective on Rajasthan: the home of brown Windsor soup, gin and tonic and, of course, dear Bufton Tufton's Taj Mahal.
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