What I’m Listening To Today, Episode #9
By: Jon Scott
Tags: Travel, Life, Music, Blog, Humor

What I’m Listening To Today, Episode #9

Vacation, The Go-go’s

I’m on a stone wall with a baguette, a flat cylindrical pack of foil-wrapped triangular cheeses, some green olives, huge circles of salami, and a plastic knife that I’ve stolen from somewhere.

Propped up against my foot is a packet of salt-laden potato chips that I will later accidentally kick into the river as I brush away some crumbs from my thighs.

I am in a village in France on the kind of budget holiday that characterised the parts of my childhood that didn’t involve fierce and terrifying adherence to some sort of unwritten playground rulebook.

I was a complacent little tike, and found none of it enjoyable, at first. This was a holiday designed by and for my parents.

The template for each excursion away from home was generally the same. Set up base camp in a shack that renders a star-rating system surplus to requirements, and then walk for eight hours. At the end of each day, get trolleyed on the local tipple, and then go to bed. Get up, rinse and repeat.

Without wishing to do my folks a disservice, I got to see a lot of the world during these largely unplanned rambles, and eventually grew to find their view on restorative breaks more palatable than most other extracurricular pastimes. The notion that no one who really wants an authentic experience lodges in a five star hotel, has stayed with me all my life. And that’s a good thing, because I’ve never been able to afford a five star hotel. They set me up well for a life measured in austerity.

These last few years, I haven’t really been able to afford a holiday, either. My place clings helplessly to the border of an affluent area, so I’m surrounded by plenty of newly minted mums and dads who can and do. They’ll zip off to Italy or the south of France for a week or two when it suits them, kids in tow, telephoning house sitters on the way out. They’re not walking anywhere, the banking sector families. Money rich, but experience poor. That’s what they are.

Their perverse idea of the holiday as a short period of excessive luxury sickens me. What it should be is a transplanting of suffering to a strange location.

If you don’t come back from a holiday relieved that it is over and ready to return to a recognisable schedule of suffering, then you’re not doing it right.

But I’m not sure it matters this year, or the next…or the one after that. I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere for a while, which is a heavy kick in the delicates, because the government is busy telling me I should.

Go! Enjoy yourself! Hop on a plane to Zanzibar! Un-pause your life!

I don’t think anything has been paused, far from it. Everything seems to be skipping forwards thousands of frames at a time. It’s terrifying.

I expect much sooner than I’d like, my well-weathered hands will be feebly tearing into bread and I will try to work up the necessary momentum to lift a piece mouth-wards. If I’m lucky, I’ll be gazing out for the first time over a rural idyll in some undiscovered part of the world. If I’m not, then…I don’t know, watching two mums fight over a space in a supermarket car park? Or an afternoon spent wrestling with the opener on the rim of a can of soup.

Maybe my son has promised to call when he gets back from his holiday. He’s taken the kids to an all-inclusive resort in Tenerife.