HOLIDAYS

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Holidays are big business. Think of the millions spent on glossy brochures and TV advertising: all trying to persuade and advise us how to spend our hard-earned and well-deserved fortnight. Holidays are an industry like any other. And not only for the providers of holidays either. Many of us approach our own holiday with an industry mentality. We've become so used to living in a world where we are expected to be hardworking achievers that we find it hard to shake that attitude off---even on holiday. Is this one of the factors behind the popularity of activity holidays of one sort or another?

We're expected to have something to show for our work, so we feel we're expected to have something to show for our holiday too: photographs of Greek ruins, an improved backhand, or at least a fantastic tan. If we haven't got something to show for our fortnight away, people might think we've just been wasting our time---and that would never do. Oddly enough, many of us don't seem to enjoy our holidays all that much.

Are we too busy making them 'productive' to enjoy them? Perhaps we need to develop what G.K. Chesterton described as, 'the most precious, the most consoling, the most pure and holy, the noble habit of doing nothing at all.'

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