I don't do holidays
Joseph Connolly
Ihate holidays — summer holidays are what I mean: hate them, hate them. And every single year, round about now, everywhere you look it's the same old story — the papers and television are awash with all this bogus and sun-bleached fevered urgency: go here, book this, experience the once-in-a-lifetime blah blah blah of a truly unforgettable yadda yadda yadda. It's all a nonsense: all we are doing is exactly what we are told. You've seen the ads (face it, sometimes you can barely breathe for the ads): the pale green sea, the white-gold sand, and there, swaying in a hammock suspended from a pair of towering palms, is the honey-brown beauty, glistening with the pearly beads of just-had-sex, her fat pink lips kissing idly at a Del Boy of a drink that is heavy on hollowed-out pineapple and paper parasols. Paradise, right? But look: she's not going to be there, is she? And every hour of the day you are meant to be blissful, are you, slung between a couple of bleeding trees and getting steadily smashed on stuff you wouldn't so much as look at back home?
But as we all know deep down, the horror and boredom and sheer high anxiety of holidays (and that is not even to mention the barely reined-in frenzy) — all that starts gnawing away at you long before you arrive. It starts, in fact, during the Christmas holidays, when you are slumped on a sofa, strung up in a bloated and barely-there trance, the television shrilly urging you to rush out and buy for yourself loads more sofas (all at unrepeatable prices) or else to abandon your home life altogether and book up immediately for somewhere (anywhere) hot and different. So you dutifully sift through the brochures and every picture seems to be identical and then you try to juggle the money side of things and then of course you have to take into account the needs of the children and then you compute with a lowering despair that up or down this is somehow going to cost you an absolute fortune (no relation to the bargain prices quoted, Lord knows why) and quite frankly to hell with the children and their needs (what about us? Don't we have needs? I think we do, I think we do), and then there's all the business of booking time off work and even that's a bit of a bugger in itself, quite frankly, because it's going to be quite a pivotal year at the office and one doesn't really want to be elsewhere when key decisions are going down — and especially not when all those
4.
damn smug youngsters are so pointedly on their way up... .
The time draws nearer, and the woman is generally in a lather about all the shopping that has to be done; T-shirts, shorts and a couple of sarongs were all she wore last year — but will she desist from packing a trunkload of brand-new summer things? She will not. And will she suffer guilt over all that outlay on top of the crippling expense of the holiday? Oh yes indeed — and the stranglehold that the thought of fun and sunny leisure now has upon you is slowly tightening its grip.
Then there's the business of what books to bring along: long-neglected classics? Recent highbrow and prestige-prizewinners? Or trash you might actually read? (Both, is the answer — so that you will be seen as neither a snob nor an imbecile.) And oh yes, listen: what about leaving the house? I know all about the front and back alarms and that wonderful gizmo that turns the lights on and off with loony regularity and makes sure that no local burglar can be unaware that your house is well and truly up for grabs (or else tenanted solely by some demented old goat who ritually and into the night plays a ga-ga game with the switches and the dimmers) — but should you go so far as to leave your keys with the neighbours? Whom you secretly (or even openly) loathe wholeheartedly, while knowing full well that as soon as you're off they'll be over for a snoop?
Then you have to cancel the papers, thereby confiding the precise dates of your absence to the coked-up delinquent who daily scatters your bundle in the vicinity of the door. Inform the police? Yeah — and while you're at it, why not just quickly sling a flashing neon sign between the chimneys: THIS HOUSE IS EMPTY — COME ON IN, GUYS! And now you turn off the water and gas, thereby guaranteeing future problems with not just boiler but also air locks, and soon you're driving to the airport and all your heads are collectively resounding with the desperate roar of effort as you strive to remember all the things you have forgotten. (Eurostar, of course, is an option — stewards will eye you with interest as you occasion a hernia while dragging your luggage up the steps and through a tiny door; travel first or premier class and you are sure to be watched and even encouraged by attendants who are far more smartly turned out.) But the airport is the likelihood, and here you can settle down to hours of sweating due to not just an overactive heating system devoted to the incubation and subsequent distribution of a very fair selection of knockout transcontinental diseases, but also because of your palpable but unspoken terror of being blown out of the sky, sky marshal or no sky marshal. Meanwhile, you continue the eternal wait, eating strange things like cheesy croissants or sticky stuff with apricots, and you ogle the first-class lounge with its cosmopolitan cool and free first-class everything which is closed quite firmly to you and yours because you're just not, are you? First class? And your attempt at an upgrade — that was a joke, quite frankly: if you look crushed in crushable trousers and thrombosis-busting stockings, what can you honestly expect?
You mooch around the garish shops that still pretend they're duty free when they're patently not, and still there are aeons of time to subdue the bolshie kids by means of blatant bribery and then get down you just two more cheesy croissants and a basin more of slush — and suddenly you're off! Just you and your loved ones, one mile up and strapped into a flying bomb. (They say to avoid alcohol when flying, which is a laugh in itself, really.) And hours and hours later, after the circling and the stacking and the delayed disembarkation and the carousel of baggage disgorging everyone's but yours, you still have before you the stagnant queue for the 100-quid taxi that will take you to the hotel that's a big disappointment, quite honestly, because the rooms and the pool in the brochure seemed to be not just a good deal larger, but also nice.
And around this point in the whole sorry venture, your stomach is sagging under the weight of an age-old ache — the mind blots it out, like the pain of childbirth — that reminds you how depressing you found it all last time. And yet here we go again ... you get up in the morning — not because you had awoken eager and refreshed and keen to be up and at it, no. You get up either because you've been startlingly woken by a foreign woman with a Hoover letting herself into your room, apologising and backing out again, or else because you are traumatised by the fear of missing breakfast — which at home, of course, you don't even eat. And then you find yourself doing things like sitting on flyblown donkeys and stinking camels, or climbing 360 steps that lead absolutely bloody nowhere at all. You burn your arms, you overdose on calamari or sangria and your stools turn to slurry. And on the last day you haggle your way through markets in currency you don't understand with people you distrust for garbage too dreadful to live with — and then solemnly agree over dinner that truly here is heaven and the thought of leaving is breaking your heart.
The return journey is worse, quite naturally, because now you are on your way back. Back you come, your suitcases chocka-block with brand-new unworn clothes, unspeakable T-shirts and shorts now swaddled around vulnerable, ugly and foolishly overpriced examples of local earthenware, fashioned by craftspeople who are having a laugh and which are better off shattered, quite frankly. Have we been burgled? How long will it take to clear the backlog of post and emails and junk faxes and messages? And oh look: the garden's like the sort of barren space where you'd string up and execute a Mexican insurgent. The water pipes are clanking fit to (please don't even think it!) bust — and it's back to work in a couple of days, and who knows what those slimy little upstarts have been plotting in your absence? And we shan't, shall we, even mention the credit card? No, I thought not.
I hate holidays — hate them, hate them. And so I don't do them. And now you know why.
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