Vacation Rules

How to be there, when you're here

So I have a question.

I recently returned — okay, it’s been several weeks, but the effects are still just lingering — from an excellent week in Europe. The underlying cause of the trip (attending the ash-scattering of a beloved older relative of my wife, a remarkable woman under whose absence the world is poorer) was not on its face a happy thing, but it was a very good day as these things go, and great to see family, and took place near a nice town in Sussex called Rye. Afterwards we spent a couple of nights in London, then three in Paris, before heading home via a curry in Paddington with my best pal.

It was honestly one of the best weeks I can remember, and it caused me to wonder —not for the first time, of course — what makes holidays so damned nice... in the hope, perhaps, of being able to bring some of that feeling to everyday life.

So let’s start with the obvious.

1. The places were great

Rye was new to me, and extremely beguiling — a very old English town in the Southeast of England that has no chain stores, is stuffed with medieval houses and studded with cosy pubs and coffee shops and places to buy cake and books.

London is London, end of.

Paris is objectively fabulous, a place we try to visit once a year, and this time we lucked into a superb little AirBNB down a backstreet in the 6th Arrondissement on the Left Bank, an area whose curving streets we’ve wandered many times but never actually stayed in. Great bookstores, a slew of cafes and restaurants and dinky shops and galleries, ten minutes’ walk from the ineffably restorative Jardin du Luxembourg, and right by the Seine, opposite Notre Dame. So we were staying in one of the nicest parts of one of the greatest cities in the world. It was bound not to be shit, really.

2. The novelty factor

Oh, the times we’ve fallen in love with a place we’ve discovered on holiday — to the point of peering in the windows of local realtors — only to remind ourselves sure, it’s nice being here: but you’re on holiday, dude. You’re not having to do all the things that plague the zombie weeks and months and years of real life. You’re not dealing with the fact that the demographic in the nicer parts of Rye, for example, skews pretty senior, so you’re almost certainly not allowed to even paint your front door without being summoned to account for your choices by a stone-faced Council of Elders.

Another example. When we’re in Paris we like to breakfast sitting outside a cafe (I never eat before lunchtime at home) and I always have the tartine avec du beurre accompanied by a café crème. A tartine is a simple slice of baguette, lightly toasted and served with one (1) little pat of butter. That’s the law. If you ask the waiter for more butter he will suddenly be unable to comprehend your haphazard but serviceable French, despite affably tolerating it two minutes previously. Should you persist, he will give you a wounded stare and go away. He will not come back with more butter. You get one (1) pat, that’s how it is. And you soon realize you don’t need the second, because you want to taste the bread (though honestly, 1.25 pats would be perfect).

Would I do this every single morning if I spent six months or two years in Paris? Probably not. Normal life and its drearily and oh-so sensible concerns would get in the way. It’d be cheaper to buy a baguette and munch it at home, and you can’t eat steak frites or duck confit or choucroute or cassoulet every night (though I’d give it a damned good try). And there’d still be taxes to pay and emails to answer and toilet roll to buy and the shower would eventually leak, and good luck dealing with Gallic plumbers given my restaurant-centered grasp of the language. Which leads me to...

3. Lack of responsibility

This is another illustration of the fact that when you’re on holiday, you’re... on holiday. A break from the quotidian, a brief release from the hassles great and small that fill your time and mind — of course from work, but also the endless freaking admin of being at home. Being free from all that relentless adulting is a critical component of the vacation vibe. The biggest decision on your plate is which of five nice-looking restaurants you’re going to try tonight. Tough, huh. The towels need washing? Someone else’s problem, pal. You don’t even have to do the bloody recycling.

There are factors — like an awareness of how fortunate you are to be able to be somewhere nice and new for a little while, feeling purely lucky for a moment, which so many of us are, to various degrees — which aren’t possible to recreate at home. And I was on holiday with the best person in the world, which helps. Being anywhere with someone you love more than life itself is the key to happiness. Though that can happen at home, too.

It just feels like some of that holiday feeling should be attainable in normal life. Like cultivating, in however short doses, the ability to relinquish the endless feeling of responsibility. Not letting all the little things accumulate until they become one great huge thing weighing you down. Training yourself to occasionally decide: “Yes, I have to do (a) and (b), and sort out (f) and (q)... but not right now. Not this minute. Not even in this half hour. Right now I’m just going to exist, free of it all, and watch that bird over there and see what it’s up to.

It’s perhaps a form of meditation, a willingness to turn from duty for a short while, to let ripples form in the pool of your mind without feeling forever constrained to give them your attention. Stepping aside from habit would help with a feeling of novelty, too. There’s plenty of places in the towns we live in that we’ve never been to before. Why not try them? It can make a surprisingly real difference. A new supermarket opened up in Santa Cruz soon after we got back, and it’s jolly nice — and it’s also simply different. During the twenty minutes I have spent in there filling a basket with wildly over-priced groceries it’s been like being in another town, seeing the place where I’ve lived for fifteen years as if from the outside. A warming glimpse beyond the veil of stale custom that time confers upon any place, however good.

It’s worth looking out for those changes — and also creating new ones. Sitting on an unaccustomed chair in the house. Walking a new route to 7-Eleven. Tackling the supermarket from the other side for once: do the produce last instead of first, go nuts. You’ll see the aisles from a new angle, maybe spot things you haven’t seen before. If you’re bored of that supermarket, go to another one, even if it’s not as good. Drink a different beer. Ignore and resist all the trapping algorithms in our lives — real or virtual, and God knows the latter keep getting stronger, voraciously backing us into the ghettos of our past preferences until we’ll never see or experience anything new. Step off all the paths, especially the ones we make for ourselves.

Be that other you — while remembering there are things in our normal lives we too often take for granted, our friends and pets and places, which deserve our re-awakened love, and attention, and gratitude.

Do you have any tips? Any practices you’ve found that shake you up, ruffle the feathers in a good way, bring a sense of freshness into every day life?

German Pop Songs are Quite Good

A random extra section: while vainly attempting to stave off the ravages of time in the gym the other day I came across an old playlist from a period when I was evidently deep-diving into European pop. So here’s three German songs you might like.

Luttenberger Klug — Wolke

I have no idea what it’s about. I just like the poppy sound of it.

Wir Sind Helden — Ausser Dir

Dunno what this is about either, except the title means “Except/besides You”. Bit more indie this one.

Sildermond — Irgendwas bleibt

I do know what this one means because there’s sub-titles available, and despite a few years old it’s a song for the world as it presents right now. And a banger. Enjoy.