Fun in the sun is not a privilege
JARE holidays a privilege? That’s what a news reporter said this week, implying that anyone desperate to escape Britain for sunnier shores is being frivolous when there’s a pandemic on.
You may have noticed the boffins aren’t keen for us to go abroad this year, preferring to keep us penned up at home, despite mass vaccination.
They obviously don’t trust the vaccine, so they’re sneakily pushing the idea that anyone longing for a foreign break is spoilt and, yes, privileged.
We Brits are good at feeling guilty, and being called “privileged” in these woke times puts you on a par with Marie Antoinette.
But a holiday isn’t a privilege; it’s a necessity, and it’s no more wicked than buying a pair of shoes.
Holidays are good for the soul. Dreaming of one, and planning it, can carry you through months of dreary drudgery. Ever since the
R19th century Wakes Weeks, when mill workers up North flocked to Blackpool for their annual week’s holiday, a bit of fresh air and fun has been seen as essential for your health.
My parents inherited that tradition, poring excitedly over brochures from January. My mum would start packing a fortnight before we left home.We weren’t allowed to wear anything “best” until we hit the promenade.
These days we want sun, sand and sea, plus a glass of rosé in a continental beach café.Yes, we’ve moved on from Blackpool, and what’s wrong with that?
Shame on Boris if he lets the Glum Brothers (Profs.Whitty and Vallance) and their slides of doom forbid our desperately needed sunshine break.
We’re vaccinated... let us out! Sensible scientists say there will be no summer third wave, whatever the doomsters predict. And those damnable graphs aren’t weather forecasts – they’re much less reliable.
IF YOU’D accused me of being addicted to my iPhone I would have laughed in your face. Me? Emotionally dependent on a piece of high-tech junk? Do me a favour. Then, on Saturday, it vanished. A brief search, confident it’d turn up, turned into a full-scale and increasingly desperate scouring of the house, even the heath opposite where I’d been playing footie with my grandson earlier. Had the blasted thing fallen onto the grass? If it had, there was no sign of it now.
I reported it missing and cancelled the simcard. But did that ease my mind? No. I woke early next morning in something perilously close to an anxiety attack. I realised I was suffering classic withdrawal symptoms
– I felt exactly the same as when I gave up smoking overnight 25 years ago. The cravings and panicky sensations were identical.
Well, the phone turned up (don’t ask) and the twitchiness instantly subsided. Like after having a sneaky cigarette. But I’m going to wean myself off dependence: I’ll turn the thing off every other day from now on. No more iPhone cold turkey for me.