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EVEN now, deep and crisp and
even, holiday brochures drop through my letter-box with a premonitory
thud, bringing me a feeling of leaden dread and, causing me to reach for
my passport, sometimes to compare its photograph with earlier ones
Look upon
this picture (circa 1963). See what a grace was seated on this brow -
Hyperion’s curls, an eye like Mars undimmed by high-ranking officers at a
cruise captain’s cocktail party and a determined chin like the prow of a
Victorian gunboat ready to resist blandishments from bogus guides and
gypsy beggars and set to bargain brusquely with money-grubbing twisters in
bazaars.
Look at me now - travel-blasted features resembling
a weather-eroded sundial with pale, staring eyes that have visit-ed scores
of native village workshops turning out typical tourist tripe, uncounted,
gloomy, Gothic cathedrals and a plethora of Byzantine frescoes, watched,
in time-dragging torpor, African fertility dances that resembled spastic
shuffles and have seen myself, obviously in a sun-baked stupor, buy
souvenirs that in-cluded a 15-inch plastic statue of Zeus for the
mantelpiece and a wooden head of Tutankhamen with attached egg-timer.
I
undergo holidays. I believe we are not here for pleasure alone and that I
and millions of others are doomed for a certain term to roam the earth in
bug-filled cruise ships, crammed aircraft in which we sit with our knees
up to our chin and suffer torments including mosquitoes and Montezuma’s
Revenge until the sins of our non-holidaying life are purged away.
On the other
hand, there are people who, perversely, not only like holidays but also
regard them as indicators of social status and believe that a high TQ
(travel quotient) - indicating the exotic quality of their holidays, such
as, perhaps, locust counting in Liberia, vampire bat watching in
Venezuela, cruising on an ice floe propelled by the Gulf Stream or
bungee-jumping from rope bridges in Bolivia rather than tonic-wine-tasting
in Totnes or getting legless in Lanzarote - could secure them good jobs
and enhance their conversational prestige in pubs and at dinner parties.
Research commissioned by the travel company, Expedia, revealed that as
many as 15 per cent of Scots found being well-travelled a more attractive
quality than usual indicators of success - luxurious home, large income,
trendy car and design-er clothes. With more Britons spending increasing
amounts of cash to holiday in countries such as Australia, New Zealand and
Japan, with activities including white-water rafting and caring for
orphaned chimpanzees, some vacations could assume Indiana Jones’ film
aspects with tourists subjected to program-med pursuits by colourfully-hostile
natives or, in some Live With the Locals leisure break, finding themselves
the centre of attraction among women-ogling tribal chiefs, insolent
mendicants and foaming and snarling pariah dogs - good grist for
conversational mills back home.
All that could result in growing
numbers of people flaunting their one-up holiday adventures at social
functions, thus making people who merely partied all night and flung
furniture into their hotel swimming pool at Magaluf feel socially inferior
and in need of a prestige-boosting spell such as surfing Pacific breakers
pursued by heel-snapping sharks.
I plan to start a counter school
of post-holiday conversation called the Vacation Veterans’ Voice. It will
be open to all tourists who have endured rather than enjoyed holidays, who
have doggedly chalked up at least six Romanesque churches before lunch,
eight local museums before dinner, tried to sleep in hotels where the
room-above occupants persistently shifted furniture around 3.15am and who
climbed 400-odd steps for the view at the top of some church spire that
they wouldn’t have taken a lift to see back home.
VVV will
comprise old holiday hands who have legged it through a wilderness of
folklore centres and bought leather wallets into which no bank-notes would
fit except Albanian leks, trekked miles, carrying picnic baskets and Lilos,
along precipitous, crumbling cliff paths to reach the absolutely unspoiled
beach only to find it filled with hornets, razor-like rocks and nude
Germans occupying the shady spots. The motto of our holiday-hardened group
will be, "We came, we saw, we suffered."
Like 12th century flagellants,
we will continue to subject ourselves to punishment - in holiday shape.
Our greatest joy will be returning home and discussing our expensive
torments with horror-struck friends. It’s a tough life; see you at the
airport check-in desk. |
