A Penny of Observation
ORDEAL BY HOLIDAY
The Holiday Spirit, to which so many references are made at this time of year in the columns of our contemporaries, is something very different from the " free and holiday-rejoicing spirit " of which Lamb once wrote. To-day, we observe with satisfaction, the term no longer connotes a heady, irresponsible gaiety—the sort of mood in which hats were unsexed and to resist their fair exchange was snobbery. There was always, to our mind, something rather un-English about such ebullient exhilaration. The British Empire was not built 011 a Bank Holiday, nor Waterloo won on Hampstead Heath. We are glad to recognize in the Holiday Spirit of to-day those qualities of fortitude, endurance and self-control which are, it is said, among the wonders of the civilized world. Whether he is advancing, with all the abandon of a pebble in a glacier, in what the Americans—aptly enough—call a " traffic snarl " seven miles long, or whether he is shuffling in disgruntled pro- cession to 'have his passport inspected, and wondering why his rulers call him a world-citizen when they clearly regard him as an international crook—in whatever form the Englishman is tasting the sweets of freedom and leisure, the Holiday Spirit of to-day can have no softening effect on his character. It is represented by nothing so well as by that civil and self- disciplined monster, that Hydra-headed like a flock of sheep, the Queue. The queue is to the modem holiday-maker what the maypole was to his forefathers. We anticipate a day when to stand in a queue will be the only form of relaxation possible
or permissible in these islands.
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