I’m in a box containing all sorts of things.

I’m stopping at the passport I got the year after my trips to France without one (see Greetings From Afar).

In 1974 you could pop into the post office for one of these. Flimsy and lacking in any sort of security.

I remember a tour around the Heineken factory and a Reistafel in Amsterdam, and the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. Nothing else. Which I’m surprised at as this was my first holiday overseas.

But now I’m confused. Because I remember that my actual first holiday abroad was a camping trip to France with Annie and her Dad in 1967. There MUST have been a passport for that. One of these flimsy ones. Now I feel overwhelmed with temporary passports, and again don’t understand how I failed to have one for working on the ferries.

The camping trip was a hoot. Annie and I had the time of our lives, having adventures and misbehaving. No surprise there…. I remember getting quite tipsy on Pernod on the first day. We’d thought it was French squash which just so happened to taste of aniseed balls.

Annie’s dad allowed us to go on a midnight hike up the local mountain – La Tournette – to watch the sunrise. But only because it was all above board, organised by the local mountaineering club. Oh dear….. there wasn’t much safeguarding in those days. It was quite a riot – guitar playing hippy types who we were so enamoured with, alcohol, cigarettes, and quite a bit of consensual kissing of arbitrary French boys who smelt of garlic!

I have no recollection of what I was up to one day when I almost cut the top off my finger. I still have the scar and I still owe 10 francs (about £90 in “today’s money”) to the doctor who put it back together after we’d been rushed to him by the campers next door. Blood everywhere.

It was the holiday where I bought bow shaped pasta – which I now know as farfalle – to take home for Mum. I’d never seen food so pretty and had never eaten pasta, so had no idea what she would do with it. It turned out to be nothing. It stayed in our food cupboard for years. My guess is that she was panicked by the idea of foreign food but also couldn’t bear to dispose of a gift from her favourite daughter! Yes, there was only one…..