I THOUGHT your foot was a pigeon. Being on holiday is a privilege. The fact that I am fighting old anxiety and agoraphobia demons with every day is an indulgence to be firmly sent to an emotional landfill never to be recycled again.

A stress reaction is, though, hard to shift. It’s a habitual response formed over many decades. Stress can also be dangerous because it affects your senses.

So far… I have fallen over on a railway platform, letting go of my four-wheel drive suitcase to save myself, watched said suitcase take a nifty left-hand turn to travel purposefully and sedately off the platform edge towards the railway track where, thanks to the presence of an undeparted train and due to my obsessive over-packing, it wedges itself into the space between closed train door and platform.

Shrieking for help, I let go of the other fourwheel drive suitcase I’m clutching in an attempt to rescue the first one. It starts to pursue its companion. My husband, unaware, has ‘helpfully’ charged ahead to check for…ummm… something important. He hasn’t noticed that I’m nowhere near and losing my luggage and my mind while two visibly shocked polite young things try and help.

Later that day, I lose a hearing aid. At the point where I am checking for it in the mini-fridge I realise all is lost. I sort of pray to St Antony, patron saint of lost things and local saint for Portugal. Feeling guilty as I always do, since I’m an atheist and my troubles are small, I am yet hopeful. Enlisting his help has often been successful.

For the first time in ages though I don’t then stumble across what I was looking for. Looking at the figurine of him I had bought, I wonder whether the thing I need to find is actually the ability to accept things, make good from bad and focus outside myself. A thought-experiment helps. I’m stressed because without my hearing aid my tinnitus is oppressive and frightening.

So, actually, what I now know with evidence is that with my hearing aid, my tinnitus is more than manageable. Even I can’t manage to find a downside to that. Back to the pigeon. Eating outside in hot countries is insane but popular. Careful of course to sit in the shade and drink water, it’s the foraging birds that are the only down-side.

Living in Teignmouth I’ve had several calamitous encounters with seagulls and would happily ‘poison pigeons in the park’ to quote Tom Lehrer’s satirical song. I really do hate pigeons – nearly as much as rats so when out the corner of my eye I detect the movement of something grey on the ground under the table, I’m ready to kick what is in fact a size 11 trainer-wearing foot.

Stress is invisible and impacts many faculties, including the ability to reason! So stressed was I by the whole pigeon, hearing aid, nearly lose pants on railway track saga that after getting money out of an ATM, when I couldn’t find my purse in my handbag, I called after a woman accusing her of having stolen my purse while it remained neatly tucked under my sweating arm.

Luckily, she didn’t respond and I can only hope it was because, fortunately, I don’t speak the local language and I hope she didn’t know any English. Then, after my incorrect accusation, the universe levelled things up. A young woman drove over our shopping. We were standing outside Lidl.

The bag was nearly the height of a toddling baby which perhaps explains why she was shaking when she realised what she’d not seen. Luckily, she only murdered a pack of six canned Super Bock beers which, having punctured, smellily fountained their contents over all the other things in the bag.

It’s a lesson that you can’t leave the less positive parts of yourself behind when you go on holiday. Bad habits will pack themselves into the corners of your mind like socks wedged into impossible spaces in a suitcase. You can though, breathe, challenge, picture change and in the peaceful moments decide to let stuff go. For me that’s a work in progress – happy holidays!