Holidays

This is a guest post by my daughter, Bella

There’s a wonderful feeling you get on holiday that is impossible to experience at any other time.

It’s a feeling that can only be matched at Christmas, when schedules and routine are thrown to the wind and the only marker of time is food. Breakfast of champions. And lunch, afternoon tea, pre-dinner nibbles and dinner – of champions.

Books are consumed greedily, one after the other brought down from the shelf piled high with the spoils of other holiday-goers: the light-hearted, seductive romance novel set in a seaside town, the memoirs of inspiring, brilliant people and the “must-reads” of the summer, their ‘buy one, get one half price’ red sticker peeling at the corner.

The sunshine warms your cheeks and the hair on your arms turns a dirty shade of blonde; your skin smells different.

The most wonderful thing about going on holiday is that it feels as though the axis your world was spinning on previously has altered. Anything’s possible when you’re on holiday. You can change your future, become someone different. Life as you knew it six days earlier will never be quite the same again.

Going on holiday feels like waking up in the morning, sleepy eyed and drowsy, and reaching for your glasses. You see clearly in a way that isn’t possible after the two days that a weekend allows. You unwind, reboot and romanticise about all the ways you’re going to change once you’re back home in familiar territory; that feeling of renewal is hard to come by, and is what makes a break from the norm so intoxicating – and necessary.

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