A sing-along made my plans go wrong

The summer holiday (part two) didn’t kick off quite the way I’d hoped last Friday morning. The dream scenario had me waking up at 7am, pulling on my running gear and doing a lap around Tokyo’s Imperial Palace, followed by an ice-cold shower and then a dip in the swimming pool at the Peninsula hotel.

This would have allowed enough time to pack up a week’s worth of purchases and press kits, down two cappuccinos, grab another shower and then jump in the car for the trip out to Narita International Airport. Post-check-in, I would have time to buy some Baumkuchen gift boxes and some extra reading material before boarding the Finnair flight to Stockholm via Helsinki. Sadly, the events of Thursday night and Friday morning conspired against me and guaranteed a sloppy start to 10 days off.

On Thursday evening, after a snappy return trip to Osaka and a round of meetings at Sony’s impressive HQ in Shinagawa, I had gone out with friends and colleagues for drinks at a tasty little izakaya in the Hiroo district. Save for a few too many bottles of white, everything could have run to plan except that my colleague Noriko had booked a banquette at a favourite bar in Ni-chome for a couple of rounds of karaoke.

This too could have been harmless, but my friend Andrew and his crew cranked up the singing stakes as well as the consumption of champagne, vodka, tequila and shochu. It was perhaps shortly after my assistant Alex and I had scored a 96 (more advanced karaoke systems have a full scoring system that ranks your performance) for our “For Your Eyes Only” duet that we elected to make it an STP (straight-to-plane) evening.

At 7am we climbed the stairs from the tiny club and were greeted by the other casualties swaying and sleeping on the streets of Shinjuku. At this point, a run around the palace might still have been a remote possibility, but on my return to the hotel I made the fatal mistake of requesting a wake-up call for one hour later. Ninety minutes on, I woke not to the sound of the telephone urgently tinkling beside me but the aggressive pounding of the door as the hotel’s public relations man tried to wake me. “We were so worried about you!’ he said. “We kept ringing and ringing but you never picked up. Anyway, the car’s waiting and we’ve spoken to Finnair to tell them you’ll be late, so you just need to be downstairs as fast as possible.’

If Narita were 15 minutes closer to the city centre we would have been fine but, despite an impressive effort by our driver, I missed the flight to Helsinki and had to settle for a JAL flight to Amsterdam. I didn’t even hear the wheels retract into the belly of the Boeing 777, but I woke up, some eight hours later north of Moscow, for a snack and then passed out again till we were on approach to Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport.

In Amsterdam I boarded my connecting flight to Stockholm (a cramped, humid 737) and despite promises of severe weather we managed to beat the storms at Arlanda airport. Somewhere just beyond passport control I felt that the holiday had its official start. In the taxi out to the archipelago, I slowly started to feel human again as I played tour guide for my colleague Emily (who’d never been to Sweden before) and counted the minutes till we’d pull up at the dock and see Mats behind the wheel of our boat. Toward the end of our journey the taxi driver joined in our conversation about Swedish summers and whether it was sustainable, in an increasingly competitive world, for the whole Nordic region to take the month of July off. Shouldn’t all of Europe take August off instead? Wouldn’t it be better for tourism if more of Sweden were open for all those high-spending visitors during July? Or should holidays be more staggered for the sake of the economy?

Arriving at the jetty, we saw Mats waiting aboard the Zodiac and the driver helped carry our luggage to the boat. Seconds later we were cutting across a still Baltic and I carried on with my tour-cum-geography lesson for Emily: “Helsinki is due east. Stockholm’s about two hours by boat that way (motioning south) and that big ship out there is one of the booze cruisers that links the two cities.”

At this point my little summer house came into view and the humid streets of Tokyo seemed years away as the gulls cackled overhead and the local, angry swan took to the sea to assert his claim over his territorial waters. I somehow managed to line the Zodiac up with our dock on the first go (a rarity, given the low waterline and my limited maritime skills,) and quite literally showed Emily the ropes.

On shore we dropped our bags, cracked open a bottle of prosecco, fired up the barbecue and grabbed our towels. Without so much as a deep intake of breath I led the plunge into sea, and in an instant all those Carpenters ballads and shochu shots seemed like flashes from a very distant galaxy. ­Summer holiday part two was well under way.

Tyler Brûlé is editor-in-chief of Monocle magazine
tyler.brule@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/brule