Leave it out, I’m on holiday!

YOU may be almost happy to see the back of August, the month of the irritating email bounce-bank: ‘I am away on annual leave.’

What a joyless bit of corporate chatter. Whatever happened to ‘holiday’ with all its evocation of ‘high days and holy days’, ‘home for the hols’, Mary Poppins’s ‘It’s a jolly holiday’, Cliff Richard’s ‘We’re all going on a summer holiday’. ‘Annual leave,’ smacks of the meagre eking out of the few days allowed to us by human resources.

Still, it could be worse. Americans talk of ‘vay-cay’ — short for vacation!