21 days of sand, sun and sea? A nightmare!

WELL, that didn’t take long. Going on previous experience, it should have been a month or so before that familiar feeling started to kick in. But no, I’m just ten days back from a three-week holiday and it already seems as if I was never away.

Granted, the timing didn’t help. There are many advantages to taking to the skies during the offpeak season: cheaper deals, smaller crowds, fewer ill-behaved children being allowed to run riot by their pig-ignorant parents and so on. Plus, of course, there was the added bonus this year of an unusually pleasant Irish summer.

But the very obvious downside to returning home at the back end of September is that it almost feels like stepping straight back into winter.

When you’ve been basking in temperatures heading for the midthirties in the Med, even a nice day back here can seem positively Arctic by comparison.

Nor, of course, are nice days a given. Take last Thursday week, for instance. Virtually everyone on flight FR7243 was wearing T-shirts and shorts, although it quickly became apparent on landing in Dublin that a full set of raingear might have been a better choice.

Needless to say, the number of people queuing for taxis at the airport rank must have been in the hundreds. So myself and my lady wife – still clad in our sunshine apparel – had little option but to jump on a bus and then walk the last 15 minutes home in a torrential downpour.

By the time we got through the front door, we could have gone to a fancy-dress party as a pretty convincing-looking pair of drowned rats. Nicely bronzed drowned rats, admittedly, but drowned rats nonetheless.

It’s not just the weather, though, is it? No sooner do any of us return from abroad than there are reminders everywhere of all the things that relentlessly drag us down: credit card bills, the daily grind, Eoghan Murphy, alarms clocks set for 7am, The Ray D’Arcy Show – the list goes on and on.

GIVEN that I knew all that before I went away, though, there must be some other reason why the post-holiday blues have kicked in so quickly. The only plausible explanation is that the act of going on holiday in the modern era must cause more stress than can be relieved by actually being on holiday. Or, in other words, the sun, sea and cocktails are more aggro than they’re worth.

Well, that’s my theory anyway. I’m sure there is a PhD thesis in there somewhere for an enterprising student of psychology.

Come to think of it, some cleverclogs might even come up with a mathematical equation that proves the point.

My own recent break got off to a smooth start, thank you very much. We were through airport security within five minutes and were knocking back a pre-flight sharpener shortly after that.

When we boarded the plane and waited for the passengers to do likewise, it slowly dawned us that – joy of joys – we appeared to have a row of three to ourselves. When it seemed clear that everyone was onboard I discreetly moved to the aisle seat, so that myself and Mrs O could use the middle pew as somewhere to stash our books, phones, magazines and oversized bars of confectionery.

It was at this precise moment that a very late arrival was ushered onto the aircraft clutching – inevitably – a boarding pass for seat 16C. I’m not sure I will ever get over the disappointment.

Almost as bad, this passenger – an American woman in her twenties – proceeded to sneeze, sniffle and snort for the next two-and-ahalf hours. But I didn’t really have time to get too annoyed by that, because I was already starting to worry that our hotel would turn out to have been closed down by the health authorities or demolished overnight.

Those fears proved to be groundless, but then I started fretting that we’d miss the train to our next destination three days later – and that the self-catering accommodation we’d booked there would, in fact, turn out to be a crack den. And what if we couldn’t find the bloke who was meant to be giving us the keys? Worse, what if the taxi taking us there was hijacked at gunpoint?

None of these things happened, of course, but even thinking they might was a stressful business. Perhaps I need a holiday.