Long life
Rest and perfect ease
Nigel Nicolson
Aeveryone seems to be on holiday except me, I shall write about holidays. This is not said in any mood of self-pity, for there will come a week in late September when I shall dispatch this column from a remote mountainside, and because my life today is an extended holiday, if one defines a holiday, as one should, as pleasurable activity in congenial surroundings.
Not for me day-long basting on hot beaches or overcrowded decks, nor a cycle of meals, drinks and gossip waited on by others. What I require from a holiday is a large chunk of solitude varied by attractive company from whom escape is easy and unresented. For that reason I commend separate holidays for husbands and wives whose marriages will be fortified by reunion after different experiences. I need a new environment every year: I have never envied people tied by a mindless purchase to a property in the Dordogne or Bahamas which they feel bound to visit annually. I need exercise, which now means walking. And, above all, some form of cultural enrichment.
Reading doesn't count. I can read at home. On holiday I want to discover a new place, which doesn't necessarily have to be abroad, and investigate, however superfi- cially, its history, people and buildings, and the process of discovery, preferably by paths through woods, fields and villages, combines all the pleasures I have so far outlined. Let there be in addition an ele- ment of hardship. I do not mean illness in any form, rat-infested inns, or half-cooked tripe, but intemperate weather occasional- ly, or struggling through maquis or breast- ing dangerous seas, provided that I can look forward to a good meal and bed. I want to be able to claim roughage at the end but not wretchedness.
My most memorable holiday followed these unwritten rules. I was walking as an undergraduate through the Peloponnese. In those pre-war days the wilder parts of Greece were roadless. I was making my way alone by night from Sparta to Kalama- ta through the gorge of the Taygetus mountains, and the path, cut into the cliff- face, with a sheer wall on one side and a precipitous drop on the other, was treach- erous and narrow. Rounding a corner I confronted a huge dog, the embodiment of the Great Pan, barring my way. Whether I advanced or retreated, it growled with that horrible intent of Greek sheepdogs, and for four hours we faced each other in the moonlight until the shepherd came. Fifty years later I passed that same spot in the comfort of a tourist coach. There can be no doubt that the earlier experience was in every way superior to the later, but it would not have been so if my memory of that hol- iday was confined to those four hours of fear.
You must gain from a holiday something unique and unforgettable, and that cannot result from one that is repeated annually or Is conventionally tame. It must be the sort of holiday for which there is no answer to the maddening question, 'Did you have a nice time?', when the questioner dreads a detailed reply and the returned traveller, whether he has been to the Yorkshire Dales or Samarkand, wants to treasure to himself experiences which can never, even by stretching its meaning to the utmost lim- its, be covered by that all-too-English word.
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