CAN you expect to be happier on holiday than in ordinary time? If so, why? Pull out from under me my support systems, my ton of sisters, the welcoming café a hundred yards away from my front door, my chair, my work — take away from me my home — and, guess what? I don’t exactly flourish. I know this is unforgivable, but what can I do?
Still, the sun was shining, everyone else seemed happy (which isn’t nothing), there was the sound of splash, fresh ice-cream, a few thousand miles of yellow noodles at every meal, and I began to see the point of it all. Maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as I had hoped.
"Just let yourself switch off," I thought, but I couldn’t help seeing images of life-support machines. Forcing yourself to relax is very stressful.
I made my new year’s resolutions, which I always do in the summer for the autumn, but I set the bar so high the inevitable failures sneered at me sharply, snapping at my ankles, making me a fool. There are people who would kill for a holiday like this, I told myself off sharply. Could I please do an exchange with one of them?
I opened the computer guiltily and googled: "What are you meant to feel like on holiday?"
Perhaps my expectations are too high, I thought. Are holidays actually meant to be deeply unsettling, but no one ever says? At home you just get on with it, you don’t have to re-invent yourself and your world every single minute of the day. The results on the screen made me gasp with horror.
A site called "How to make your life feel like one long holiday 24/7" came up. It was like a horror film. I opened the link tentatively, viewing the words through squinty eyes: "Try and arrange your home so it feels as though it is in another country," it advised.
I shook my head wildly and snapped the laptop shut, as if it might bite.
I sat down and read in one sitting a wonderful biography of Fred and Adele Astaire — the best thing I have read this year. At the close was a picture of them, brother and sister in age, taking a stroll on a blustery-looking day in Ireland in the 1960s, their walking sticks caught in a sudden moment of madcap abandon and transformed, by showbiz magic, into vaudevillians’ canes.
Adele white-gloved and beaming, has a still-shapely leg jauntily raised; Fred, in a mackintosh, his face creased, his stick pointing skyward, lifts his foot, all a twinkle, as high as his other knee. Both are sporting penny loafers, and all around them is an atmosphere of sheer pleasure and sophistication and experience, an unusual combination. It was such a lovely image I burst into tears.
I read a charming and poetic novel set in an undertaker’s. I read a gripping short story about a mother and her daughter at the funeral of their hamster. I read a memoir by a man whose father had committed suicide. It wasn’t even tea time. I had a cup of tea and two squares of hazelnut chocolate, and felt my ordinary tide of worries floating away a little.
It wasn’t a million miles from the feeling you get when you take half a diazepam on Christmas night as a reward for good behaviour, only every other year. Where’s the harm? "Is this what it is meant to feel like?" I wondered. It was a kind of warm numb sensation — the sort of state we are supposed, all our lives, to fight.
Then I did something really stupid. I opened the computer and typed in the name of a character in my new novel to see, what, if anything, would emerge. What came up was a real woman with the same name, in the same profession, in the same town as my heroine!
It was almost impossible to believe. I even wondered if I had conjured myself into some sort of 1970s Tales of the Unexpected episode brought about by holiday-stress. I pictured the lapping flames of the credit sequence: the play within the play within the play, the hammy music, that sense of foreboding and possibly the appearance of seamed stockings. Instantly, I saw there was a problem. My heroine, though conscientious and inspired, did not fare well in her chosen sphere, to put it mildly, and the real-life woman of the same name was a super-professional-sounding consultant. Oh dear.
Flurries of emails, agents, editors, phone calls, lawyers… then hours of searching for a new name for a woman I invented eight years ago. Busy, busy, busy. At last! A crisis to brave. I was needed. Hurrah! What luck! Well, it was, and it wasn’t.
The Financial Times
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