It’s about more than just time off; we think of ourselves as being at our most pure and best on holidays, and we strive for them to be of a different calibre to real life.
I just had lunch with a man who said he hated holidays. They fill him with dread. It’s one of those things you really have to love. You can’t say: I don’t want my holiday, could I go back to work instead? It’s somehow offensive, like saying you don’t like sex or breakfast in bed. Actually, it’s more acceptable to have gone off sex and eating breakfast in a prone position than to not take your holidays. Holidays are one of the few universal indefatigable human traits. Opposable thumbs, tears and looking forward to a fortnight away are what make us human. So when you say you don’t like holidays, people ask to move their desks, don’t let their children come over on play-dates and start divorce proceedings.
When did you first start having this irrational and antisocial loathing of recreational downtime, I asked. Right from the start, he said. I hated the first holiday I ever went on. The family took us away for a weekend at the seaside when I was seven. I was really looking forward to it. My mum told me how wonderful it would be and how much I’d love it, and what a good time we’d all have, and that there’d be ice-cream and fairy floss and sandcastles and donkeys and Punch and Judy and a pier and fish and chips. So what happened – it rained? No, the weather was fine, there was the ice-cream, fairy floss, sandcastles, donkeys, Punch and Judy, the pier, and there was fish and chips. They were dreadful. Horrible. It was such a disappointment. Why? Well, fairy floss is a filthy pink unpleasant cocoon, cheap ice-cream is like white pig fat (in fact, it is bleached pig fat), sandcastles are a silly bore, donkeys smell and have huge yellow teeth, Punch and Judy are sociopathic and if piers were streets on land you’d never go near them. I quite liked the fish and chips.
I see. So you were born a cynic, even at the age of seven. No, I was just born a realist. I’ve tried to go on holiday many, many times. Over the years I’ve been on at least 40 holidays and the best I’ve experienced is disappointment. Where was that? A weekend in Venice. That was very disappointing. But not as terribly disappointing as Istanbul. It is, he said, the expectation that sinks the holiday.
As well as being a realist, I am also an optimist, which combines to make me a fatalist. Whoever said it’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive never went on holiday.
I have a feeling that quite a lot of people find holidays a bit of a strain, although of course they couldn’t possibly admit it. The planning, the expense, the competitive photography. The obligation to have an experience that is of a different calibre to real life. Two weeks every summer that are a window into a higher existence. The holiday is your reward for work. More than that, our holidays are the definition of who we really might be if somehow we stepped up and had a more angelic existence. We like to think of ourselves as being at our most pure and best on holidays. This is all a modern construct. The very idea of a holiday is barely a century old in the sense of secular time spent doing nothing but indulging and pandering to pleasure. A holy day was conceived, as the name suggests, to be exactly the opposite – a religious moment of mortification, fasting and righteous self-analysis and purging. Work was what made you who you are. Toil was physically, intellectually and spiritually the purpose and obligation of existence. Not to work was mildly sinful. Travel outside business wasn’t a pleasure; it was either an education or a cure. Restorative relaxing was what you had a garden and a rocking chair for.
I do have a great sympathy for all this. I rarely go on holiday; though I travel constantly, it’s almost always work. And while it’s almost invariably exciting, interesting and entertaining, it’s rarely relaxing. And it’s always fully engaging. But just a couple of weeks ago, the person whom I share a home and a family with said, that’s it. That’s it. Utterly, utterly it. I need a holiday and I need it now, and I need you to come with me. Well, of course. I’ve arranged, she said, for us to go to the Hotel Splendido in Portofino, on the Italian Riviera. We will do nothing. We will do nothing in elegant poses. We will do nothing covered in oil. And silk. And linen. We will do nothing in scented pools. We will do nothing under the stars, nothing under the sun.
I like a hotel that doesn’t hedge its self-regard. If you call yourself the Splendido, then you’d jolly well better be splendido. And it is. It’s indubitably the most splendido hotel I’ve been in. It was small without being bijou, smart without being chic, comfortable without being suffocating, and expensive without … well, without embarrassment. The food is perfect: Ligurian. It’s served as if service were a calling. Things that should be hot came hot and things that should be chilled came cold. Peaches were ripe, coffee intense and the pesto the best in Italy. And the other guests were so like the collected suspects from an Agatha Christie novel that you really didn’t need to take a book to the pool, which was saltwater and hangs over a view that was everything your grandmother wanted Italy to be like.
A series of stepped gardens down to the tiny port where there are a couple of decent restaurants where you can eat baby squid and drink absurd cocktails made out of mutilated strawberries and watch the passeggiata. And reflect that, as holidays go, the Italians probably produce the best in the world. They invented the idea and have worked very, very hard indeed at apparently not working at all.
After four days, we went home. She was restored, refreshed and relaxed, and I must admit that I was perplexed. I had done nothing under the sun and it didn’t bother me one bit. Which rather bothered me. So I wrote this, which made it work. And now I can relax.