On Holidays

On Holidays

A voluntary exile. A purposeful disruption from the normal run of life. The desire to ‘go on holiday’, like the desire to have children, can only keep recurring by episodes of selective amnesia. Every year, people have awful, traumatic experiences in foreign countries, but yet they keep coming back for more - why?

I’ve recently been on holiday. As holidays go, it wasn’t too bad. It had several enjoyable moments. But already, I can feel that the bad bits, of which there were also several: the tedium of the flight, for example, and the frustration of having constant access to all my books and music, are fading into the background. The real holiday is being replaced in my mind by a fictional holiday, with all the bad bits cut out. Already, when people ask me if I had a good time, I feel the urge to lie to them and make it sound better than it was. I’m not sure why this is. I think I might feel ashamed of telling people that I didn’t have a good enough time.

When I think of holidays, I just think of the good bits. When I am considering planning a holiday,  the last thing I think about is the practicalities. This is the first trick that holidays pull on you. Because if you thought about the booking of holidays, the dilemmas of packing, the trauma of travel and the inevitable disappointment on arrival, then you would probably decide to stay at home. The holiday in its infancy, its foetal stage, much like the ultrasound scan of a 3-month-old dictator in the womb, does not resemble the tyrannical misery-inducing force it is going to become. The pre-natal holiday is a vague confluence of elements - blue skies, sun, food, ‘culture’ - that are barely thought about. They are just images in the mind’s eye: a beach in the afternoon; the turquoise blue sea; a meal with people one hasn’t ever met laughing across a table; a hotel balcony and exotic guitar music drifting up from the town square. That none of these events will materialise, or if they do, their specificity will annihilate the pleasure that the vagueness of anticipation allows, hardly crosses the mind. After all, when thinking of holiday, very little does. 

The actual experience of a holiday will vary, depending mainly on one factor: how much money you have. The old adage about money not buying happiness, but buying a first class ticket whilst you are looking for it, is most directly applicable to the holiday situation. Money allows you to smooth the rough edges off even the most unpleasant experiences. Money buys you a more exclusive, less crowded destination; expensive seats on flights at reasonable times of the day. Taxis - another expense - eliminate the effort at each end of the flight. Then there are the hotel suites, beaches, restaurants etc. In this sense, money makes for better holidays. The only thing to be said against having this kind of money is that it must be so insulating that the transit from one state of luxury to another must be about as fascinating as the transit from the living room to the bedroom. 

For some, only the random intrusion of unwanted interventions that relative poverty foists upon us can make for a successful holiday. This would accord with the theory that happiness is not something that can be planned, but rather always waits in ambush where you least expect it. By that token, a holiday that goes exactly as planned is, paradoxically, a disaster. In the worst of all possible disaster scenarios, when friends or colleagues ask you how your holiday went, you would simply be able to hand them the brochure and say, ‘that’. Not being able to do that is one of the luxuries of the budget holiday. A luxury the rich cannot afford.

The holiday brochure, along with the communist manifesto and the airline magazine, are the most mendacious works of literature yet published. The most obviously manifest falsehood is the complete lack of beggars and thieves in holiday brochures. Beggars are everywhere in the modern world, and we are all used to seeing them at home. They scarcely become more exotic in a foreign country, although we tend to feel less responsibility for them. They are not our beggars: we didn’t make them destitute, and we can safely ignore them. Thieves on the other hand, can’t be ignored. The herd of tourists, ignorant of local places, customs and prices represents, for the thief or swindler, the equivalent of the home shopping experience. Being robbed abroad is an integral part of a great number of people’s holiday experience. The ideal holiday brochure would offer you a portfolio of criminal experiences: pickpocketed on an escalator in Barcelona; robbed in a Warsaw hotel room; mugged on a Caribbean beach. Who hasn’t sat for hours in the dreary and frightening interior of a foreign police station, ready to be taken through a casting directory of local pimps and hoods? That is what a truthful brochure would include.

A holiday always disappoints, but we always come back. That’s because a holiday is metaphorical. What is a holiday, but the dramatic enactment of life’s eternal search for happiness? It is a fantasy, sustained in community, that happiness is an achievable finished state. How do we know we can be happy? Because we had it - for that afternoon, on a hillside in Kashmir, on a beach in Malaga. And once happiness has been achieved, our gut instinct tells us that since it has been achieved once, it can be repeated ad infinitum, and drawn out for ever. Of course this isn’t true. The thing that makes that afternoon, that evening so perfect is the very fact of the rupture from normal activity. To draw it out for several months would be pointless: that would become the new routine, and only something completely different would seem like paradise. Enjoying holiday then, the concept of holiday, depends not just on the involuntary amnesia of forgetting the peripheral agonies of travel, but also on willfully submitting to a collective fantasy that happiness is something other than a state of mind. In that dictatorship, happiness is a place, and that place is called Holiday.