01 September 2016

Talking About Holidays

A question of points on the board.

By Chin Chin

Like fruit, topics of conversation have their season, one week’s chatter supplanting another.  This time it is Olympic medals; then it will be a new book; the week after that a corruption scandal spiced with a little sex on the side or, if society is in one of its more serious moods, what Britain should do about the refugee crisis.  In a way that is reassuring.  The inability of the British to take one thing too seriously for too long is one of the things which makes us a liberal and easy-going race.  “Yes, we did discuss the threats from radical Islam last week, Mr Frobisher, and I might have promised to give you my support, but now the topic seems so… yesterday.”

I expect that this need to continually move on is deeply embedded in human DNA. It has advantages too.  It means that if you particularly dislike the topic which is au courant, the pain is probably temporary. Of course there are exceptions. Some things go round and round, at least for a time, and it cannot have been particularly pleasant to listen to the incessant London house price discussions ten years ago if you had already sold at what you had believed to be the top of the market.

Still, even there the cycle has taken its toll and the “smoothing off” of house prices (even Chin Chin has been infected by estate agents’ euphemisms) has taken the topic off the list for a bit.

Some conversations come up annually and, as August gives way to September, the returning hordes talk about their holidays.  It isn’t, of course, exactly news.  The listeners will already have seen pictures on facebook, probably of people who they thought were their friends enjoying themselves at parties to which they themselves were not invited.  It is, however, highly competitive, not so much in terms of the cost of the holidays but in terms of having fun and the collecting of what those who arrange gap year projects would describe as “life experiences”.

If you are really going to impress your friends (and, after all, isn’t that the reason behind most holiday planning?) you need to include a number of “wow factors” which are easily communicated by social media or dropped into conversation.  To avoid disappointment at later drinks parties it isn’t a bad plan to score these as you go along and to make sure that they add up to a satisfactory total.

Let’s start with transport.  Once upon a time taking an aeroplane would have scored a straight ten but that was in the days of biplanes and flying boats. Now we have all passed through Luton (if you’ll forgive the somewhat sordid though apt analogy) and, even if you follow through with business class flights, it hardly counts as an achievement.  For flying then: nil points.

Typically, cruises do little better because of their image as the holiday for the retired.  Still, it all depends on the circumstances and you could notch up a higher score. Drifting around the Mediterranean may put few points on the board of itself, but suppose that your boat was the only one to go up the Nile that week and that you had to take armed guards when you went to see Luxor?  That would be much better. If the guards were mounted on camels: better still, provided you get the photograph.  If you manage to get a photograph of the camels kneeling in the sand as the guards salute you, clearly up near ten again.

Trains and long distance motoring probably score slightly higher in the adventure stakes than cruising, although motoring is best done in a vintage open top sports car. Slightly Edwardian clothes, Brideshead style, will also help but to get the points on the board you really need some good photographs of you enjoying yourself, glass in hand, chatting to an attractive local who is leaning rather suggestively against the bonnet.

With a little care it should be possible to drum up some points on even the quietest holiday abroad. What about a picture of you sitting in a restaurant, happily drinking wine with your new friends in Southern Spain? Yes, you may have had to buy the drinks to get them to pose but those who view the photograph on Facebook will not know that. Nor will those to whom you chat about your fascinating evenings with Felipe when you get home.

What then about those who do not go abroad at all, those who spend a couple of weeks in the West of England or in Wales?  How do they reach a satisfactory score when they spend much of the time playing monopoly in a guest house in order to avoid the rain pouring down outside?  Actually it shouldn’t be too difficult provided that they bear in mind one important point. The points you score relate to the way in which your holiday can be presented and not to whether you actually enjoyed it.

Suppose you go to Stonehenge, for example.  It is a wet and drizzly day and your shoes fill with water as you stand outside the ropes wishing you had paid the premium to get amongst the stones themselves. For a photograph of that: nil points. All right, let’s use photoshop to move your image up next to the middle stone and to brighten up the day. That looks better now: say three points. Add a druid with whom you appear to be in deep conversation and, even though the brighter members of your audience will realise that he must be a modern person dressed as a druid, the points ratchet up again. Keep working on these principles and you will soon have turned your miserable monopoly-infested holiday into an enviable survey of the culture of Britain.

Actually, if you develop this logically, there is no real need to go away at all. You could simply turn out the lights and pretend to be away, secretly sitting in some back room of the house, being careful not to answer the phone. Then you could download pictures of your favoured locations and put yourself at the centre of the action. It is, of course, important not to get carried away, as a picture of yourself in full armour driving the Arabs back from the gates of Constantinople may well raise questions.  Still, it is a cheap way of creating a holiday and, indeed, if you compare it with sitting in a boiling car stuck behind a fallen bridge on the road to Dover not an unpleasant way either.

If you feel that this is all rather beneath you, there is another approach.  You could eschew society until the autumnal political crises push holidays out of everybody’s minds.  It really cannot be long!

 

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