I don’t go on holiday. Ever. Offer me two free tickets to Florence and a hotel
overlooking Piazza San Lorenzo, and I will politely insist that you give
them to a couple with a masochistic streak. Since I was freed from my
parents’ clutches, I have never voluntarily taken a traditional holiday in
my life and can think of no inducement that would persuade me to join the
hordes who spend a fortnight “doing” culture or lying on a beach or eating
five-star meals in the lap of luxury.
But I work pretty hard and surely deserve a break. Wouldn’t a holiday be fun?
Like happiness and love, fun is one of those peculiar quantities that can
rarely be obtained by seeking it directly. You have a higher chance of
having “fun” helping cyclone victims in Burma than taking a flight to
Barcelona with the specific aim of living it up. Fun is a byproduct, like
yeast extract. Trying to have fun is as doomed as trying to make Marmite
without a brewery.
Even arranging the holiday is a bother. You go “conveniently” online to buy
the tickets, entering in the dates and times, lodging your credit card data,
only to have the site implode. Starting from scratch, you discover that in
the past five minutes the flights you had selected have doubled in price. No
matter how long you pore over hotel web pages, their bucolic photographs
will bear no resemblance to the flea-pit with a rusty shower stall half an
hour’s bus ride from the coast.
Expenditure is stressful. Not knowing what you’re doing is stressful. The
pressure to make the right decisions with so much dosh and precious free
time at stake is very stressful. Mind you, the more effort and money you
pour into your “fun”, the higher the likelihood that you won’t have any.
Yet at this point the bother has barely begun.
You now have to get to the airport so early that for the time it takes to fly
to Majorca, you could have paddled to the island in a rowing boat. As for
security, the airport authorities’ latest answer to terrorism is to treat
every last passenger like a criminal.
Don’t imagine that after parting with hundreds of pounds you’ve a right to get
on a plane: in truth, you have bought nothing but an aspiration. You’ll
crawl onto that plane only if officialdom is feeling magnanimous and you’re
a good camper who jumps the hoops. Is your hand cream less than 100
milli-litres? Did you bring any “sharps”? (The usage itself grates; no one
outside the rarefied world of airport security calls a pair of scissors or a
pocketknife a “sharp”.)
Air travel is now an exercise in humiliation. Removing your shoes gives the
rest of the queue a whiff of your dodgy socks, while your haemorrhoid cream
is displayed for all the world to see in a one-litre Ziploc. The keenest
humiliation is the insult to your intelligence. While you’re publicly
berated over that concealed quarter-teaspoon of lip gloss, the guy behind
you is putting a cluster-bomb on the belt that they wave right through.
If, like me, you look unusually harmless, you’re sure to have had your
boarding card marked for the super-duper security drill: doing a Jane Fonda
workout while bombarded with rays that will give you leukaemia. But God
forbid you should get angry – which used to be what sane people did in a
so-called “free society” when being treated like rubbish, but is now
punishable with 10-to-life.
The last time my boarding card was smitten with the mark of Cain was in
America. Picture it: I’m made to stand inside a little white circle marked
out on the carpet, as if I’ve been caught firing spitballs at the kid in the
front desk; no one looking on would ever imagine that I’ve done nothing
wrong. Once a good 10 minutes pass with no available personnel to put me
through the Jane Fonda, my plane is on last call. I dare to express
annoyance.
“Ma’am – you’re going to have to calm down.”
“I am calm,” I say icily. “No, ma’am, you’re upset and you’re not going
anywhere until you calm down.”
“I am merely being firm,” I insist. I end up conducting a lengthy discourse
about what constitutes “upset” versus “firm” and meanwhile my plane is
taking off.
This is what we subject ourselves to for “fun”? People who have to run this
gauntlet of shame for business would have to be barking to ask for the same
degradation on their own time. Add to the security farce: the flight taking
off two hours late, making you feel especially gormless for having arrived
three hours early; subsequent missed connections and whole planes that, as
if by a tin-pot South American dictator, have been disappeared; overweight
seat-mates who hijack your armrest; broken video consoles; the closure of
terminals because some wally left his bag with a bacon butty unattended on a
bench – obviating the whole holiday exercise, since you can simply bring
your sleeping bags and have a free camping trip in a Heathrow hall-way; lost
luggage, especially if you were dumb enough to fly BA, in which case you
probably deserve it.
Then it’s time for some more hard work – although some people call it tourism.
Filling up your dance card, taking in as many sights as time permits. The
trudges are gruelling: from battlegrounds to castles, from galleries to
churches.
When I see frazzled families on holiday, I don’t only feel sorry for the
parents but also for the children. What I remember about being in my own
parents’ tow is resentment at having no control – and in the most primitive
respect.
My family took most holidays in a Chevrolet with an elusively nauseous smell
(an admixture of mildew, toasted-coconut Dunkin’ Donuts and cigarettes – and
my parents didn’t smoke). My enduring impression of these drives across
America – when I was not getting car sick – is of needing to pee. My father
is an impatient man with a capacious bladder and we kids found having to ask
“to go to the baffroom” mortifying. So I’d tap my mother’s shoulder and
whisper in her ear once I was about to explode. My father’s ritual refrain?
“Can’t you wait? We’ll be there in another two hours.”
Now I’ll capitalise on my reputation for saying the unsayable: I hate museums.
(Okay, I don’t mind the art ones, so long as I don’t have to dwell soulfully
on every lithograph miniature for 15 minutes.) Dutiful, cowed and guiltily
bored, I always feel as if I’m on a school trip. Furthermore, the manner in
which museums present information somehow ensures that I never retain it. I
can’t tell you how many tiny-print plaques I’ve read under the cooking
utensils of Papua New Guinea or Egyptian ceremonial masks and I remember
zilch.
Of course, an entirely different class of escape beckons in contrast to this
up-and-at-’em beavering from plaza to palace: the decadent sort, at a beach
resort or on a cruise. But, to me, pure hedonism is hell. Limping from
20-acre breakfast buffet to elevenses to lunch, slept off in time for cream
tea. Dabbing away the jam to dress for a five-course dinner. Washing it all
down with mimosas, white wine, lager and cognac . . . Gluttony is
enervating. And how can you enjoy food if you never allow yourself to get
hungry? Is it “fun” feeling fat?
Whenever I’m surrounded by excess, my experience isn’t of indulgence but of
painful restraint. Absent that restraint and I am actively miserable. Many
of us ruin what small pleasure might be had from a gateau by anguishing,
while the frosting is still in our throats, over how we’re ever going to
starve it off back home. A third chin makes for a pretty crap souvenir.
In fact, I’m so horrified by the all-you-can-eat get-away that I’ve never
opted to take one. But my sampling of conventional holiday-making doesn’t
derive solely from childhood.
Ten years ago my former companion J and I mapped out a month in Portugal,
Spain, France and Italy. We had resolved to move from our home in Belfast,
and the official purpose of this journey was to find a new place to live.
For the first three days we trooped into Lisbon super-markets to note the
price of butter and inquired at our pensao about the average rents for
flats. But on the third night, overbife de porco à alente-jana, J had a dark
epiphany: the book he’d been commissioned to write was a nonstarter, he told
me. No book, no advance; no source of income, no new country. We should
probably just move to London, J grumbled (which we did). Robbed of our goal
we were left – to my dismay –on holiday.
Now that we were travelling for “fun”, I fell prey to an insidious existential
angst. I was in a foreign country and I didn’t know what I was doing there.
I did not understand my purpose, my project. When we reached Paris, I
couldn’t remember why I was meant to care that the Palais-Royal was
commissioned by Cardinal Richelieu in 1639. I couldn’t get my head around
why I was a better person for knowing that Balzac was buried in the
Cimetière du PèreLachaise. I became troubled by the suspicion that I wasn’t
really interested in anything. So I went through my fraudulent paces,
gawking dully at the Champs-Elysées but battling a soporific apathy and
thinking mostly about where to eat dinner.
Where to eat dinner soon enjoyed such pride of place in our day’s architecture
that it became embarrassing. How much brooding did the average din-din
require back home? Whoosh, I took the chicken out of the freezer: five
seconds. Moreover, when our neighbourhood Turkish joint served a stingy
portion of hummus, no big deal. On holiday in Italy, a merely indifferent
linguine con pestowas crushing.
Morbidly afraid of not getting our daily exercise, J and I walked. Through
Oporto, Barcelona, Arles, Paris, Genoa, Venice, Verona and Bologna (the town
I mournfully determined would have made a splendid new home), we walked for
eight hours a day. We didn’t talk much. (Having abruptly unemployed himself,
J was depressed – and that’s the other thing about holidays: they don’t
spare you your troubles but provide all too ample an opportunity to dwell on
them.)
By the third week of this 9-to5 slog, trying fiercely to have “fun” and
therefore, of course, failing, J and I were pining for home. In retrospect
I’m glad to have seen those cities, and there was a poignant intimacy in our
mutual incompetence at the standard vacation. Nevertheless, it was a long
month, a dissociating month, a weird and wearying month that we were both
relieved to see the back of, and I’m not sure that I’d want to go through it
again.
Clearly, I am not cut out for this stuff. So if I’m going to work that hard at
fun, I would rather have fun at work. That’s my favourite form of
exploration, the kind that services a novel or piece of journalism.
The finest of these research expeditions was the year I spent in Nairobi while
writing Game Control, my fourth novel. (In general I advocate living in new
places over merely visiting them.) I was gainfully occupied, and I knew why
I was there. I had a reason to care about Kenya, so I did care. I made
friends. We went on adventures. I was never in danger of staring down
another wildebeest and wondering what the hell I was doing in the Masai
Mara.
Alas, not everyone’s occupation entails travel. So you’ve two weeks off in
August. What’s a body to do?
Well, you don’t have to be a writer to travel with a sense of purpose. Come up
with a reason to go. Look up a friend, attend a jazz festival. Collect
something, sketch. If nothing else, do a bicycle tour, which works up an
appetite and fills the day.
If finance permits, a second home has merits. (My husband and I keep a little
dump in Brooklyn.) While providing a change of scene, it isn’t a tourist
destination and so doesn’t torment you into shambling through museums that
you secretly hate.
A proper residence will be replete with a corkscrew, ibuprofen and paperbacks.
While costly, at least second homes don’t charge five quid for bottled water
or hold your firstborn hostage because you moronically ate the macadamia
nuts in the mini-bar.
A cheaper and lower maintenance option is to fake a second home by making a
pilgrimage to the same rental cottage, year on year. Repetition compounds
meaning and protects you from the what-am-I-doing-here heebie-jeebies. And
children love sameness.
Yet what especially recommends a second home isn’t the “second” but the “home”
bit. So what’s wrong with home, full stop?
My own perfect holiday is a fortnight at home with no deadlines, appointments,
book launches, literary festivals or – ugh – lunch dates. I sleep till 11am.
I remember my dreams. I read books that I do not have to review and that I
can stop reading if I don’t enjoy them, like a normal person. I feel free to
ignore the phone and gleefully allow e-mails to accumulate unanswered.
For no good reason, I draw a coloured-pencil cauliflower that no one will ever
see. I go to boot sales to make small-talk with my neighbours and find an
incredibly charming butter dish for 50p. I play a spot of tennis. I try the
recipe for glazed poppy seed tea cake that I down-loaded three years ago. I
stay up until 3am watching all the recorded films that are maxing out my
set-top box hard drive. I end the night with a single chocolate, accompanied
by Absolut Pears vodka with a dash of Campari and lime.
Now, that is fun.
Lionel Shriver’s latest novel, The Post Birthday World, £7.59 on
timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst or call 0870 160 8080 or click
here.
