Ten friends, two decades, same holiday house. It really shouldn’t work | Rhik Samadder

I don’t like spending time with people, but to have a bunch of friends willing to stomach weeks of me, playing the same games and having the same arguments is special

At the table, Andy is making a seven-cheese and meat sandwich that defies belief. In the hallway, Rhik is cracking himself up by wilfully mispronouncing Billie Piper’s name. Billy Pooper. Billy Pooper. Selina enters now, talking loudly about a colleague’s affair, as if she is on the phone, but she is not on the phone. Abandoning his book, a summery hardback about the history of slavery, Amish Tom asks if anyone wants to go for a bike ride. “Apparently, there’s a market town 50km from here.” Kate, who treats any mention of exercise as the punchline to a joke, sprays him with baguette crumbs.

Going on holiday with friends is a risk. People have different musical tastes, rise at incompatible hours, follow particular diets; they have varying ideas of a good time, reasonable budgets and who it’s OK to bring back to the flat and at which hours. Holidays are when you discover that aspects of people you previously liked are quite grating after five hours. Or that they have unfamiliar sides to their character, leading to the counterintuitive feeling you know them less well than before, and a post-holiday distance emerges while you recalibrate the relationship. It’s hard going on holiday with your mates. Or at least it should be.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2M1u4LL

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