Summer Holiday
All this talk about summer holiday -- the journalists are nagging away for it, the businesses are demanding it, and I wonder, can the British people be that foolish?? Forget the virus doing its evil dance all over the world and fly happily into its net?
Growing up in India as I did, the idea of a holiday was not even a remote dream in my Keralam days. When anyone got leave from work they got on a train and went to their parental homes. Indeed, if we travelled anywhere, it was to visit family or friends. It was only when I came to live in England that I realized that going on holiday was an annual ritual here, which most families -- if they could afford it -- looked forward to. There was a whole corporate sector devoted to it, families saved up for it through the year. And, when they came back from these annual pilgrimages, they came with snapshots, tan and enough table-talk for a whole year.
I couldn't see the point of going away to live for a week or two in a hotel room or a 'home-stay.' To go a long way, to sleep in an unfamiliar bed, in a strange town, spend a great deal of money in the process, and then return home with, if you are lucky, a tan (for me, the joke of the year, probably, as I am not white) to show for it, which may last a month at most. It took me a while to realize that this is a carefully cultivated 'legend' as Hariri calls it in his 'Sapiens,' where he lists quite a few of these legends -- Gods, religions, banks... some like banks quite useful. This holiday legend benefits airlines, hotels, B and Bs, and restaurants. I can understand, to a degree, why people wish to run away from a British winter, but why go anywhere when the gardens are ablaze with colour, the sun is shining and one can pack away the winter regalia of caps, coats and cardigans.
I went on holiday twice in my life with my daughter and granddaughter. The little one was full of exciting stories about all the wondrous places her friends had been to over summer. Some even ended up in Kerala, where I started from! So we rented a holiday flat in Salubrenia, in Spain, for a week. I think I spent most of it on the little balcony of the flat. I read, which I could have done at home, I cooked in the little kitchenette, which I could do much better at home. Told myself I was unadventurous and boring.
We repeated that in Ilfracombe in Devon another time. Again, lovely place, but I preferred home. I counted the days, slept badly and thought, 'never again.' In my working days I had to travel to, and live in, many interesting countries. I consoled myself that I was just fed up of travelling again, can't be my lack of initiative.
I am really respectful of the pandemic out there. I don't want anyone to travel anywhere until it is safe to do so. And we must close our borders tight so that the invisible monsters cannot sneak in in their various mutations.When the business sector and the Press and T V do their committed daily clamour to remove all restrictions on travel, I hope that Johnson and Hancock will continue to resist the noise and do the one thing that they have got nearly right in the course of the pandemic, while the vaccinations cover the entire population of the U K. I wish they'd close down our borders properly. Maybe they are waiting out that repeated three-week lag they allow for the virus to get ahead of us.
One year without a holiday will not kill us, but this year, a holiday just might.
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