I never rated holidays until life got me stuck in a rut

After 25 years of naysaying, I find myself suddenly coming around to the idea of a proper holiday. For most of my adult life, I have rejected utterly the idea of “escaping” for two or three weeks abroad.

Indeed, for most of my adult life, I rejected utterly the idea of leaving home, never mind the country. While I just had myself to please, I took my annual leave and stayed home. What, after all, was there to escape from? This way, I was surrounded by my own books, I slept in my own bed and I could use my own loo. Why on Earth would you want to run away from that, instead of indulging in all those delights to their fullest during your precious fortnight off work?

I married the man I married, basically, because he, like me, didn’t have a passport. That’s simpatico at a deep level, my friends. We did start going to Norfolk every year, but even I was aware that you would still be looking at me a long time before you were reminded of Marco Polo.

But times change, and we, unless we’re very careful, change with them, and I must have let my attention slip. Because now I see the wisdom in what a friend once, at the time bafflingly, told me: “Holidays, going somewhere different – it slows life down.”

I feel the truth of that now. The days, weeks, months and years seem to rush past me at an ever increasing speed because they run along such familiar lines. Weekdays revolve around work commutes, school drop-offs, pickups, making dinner and washing up. Weekends are for the supermarket, an Improving Cultural Activity followed by a slump in front of the telly for us all, finishing up with visit to Grandma and Grandad for Sunday lunch. Months are marked by term starts and stops and, before you know it, it’s birthday time/hallowe’en/ Bonfire Night/christmas again.

You don’t get stuck in ruts. You trundle endlessly along them, wearing them smooth and gradually, mindlessly gathering speed.

A holiday is needed to stop the heedless rush. I get it now.