Shattered Dreams

The holiday blues. Someone was talking about this on the forum the other day. Holidays, I thought. I remember them. They did start to fade into irrelevance when it occurred to me that what is virtually my back garden is what holidays largely meant - the beach. But I still do remember them. And the blues. One time sticks firmly in the mind. Returning from France in a state of terminal misery, putting the television on and being transported to the reassuringly unreal world of Mulder and Scully - suspension of reality; more suspension of reality, because holidays are just that, and the blues are the result of realising they were all a dream. The theme music for "The X-Files" will always be associated with holiday end rather than the "want to believe", or maybe it is the latter - belief in something else, a different state of being.

Holiday blues, for some, start before the holiday. The holiday is after all, or so we are told, one of the more stressful events in our lives. I've never bought that argument, but there is the potential stress for some who, as the plane is taxiing, feel the urge to dismantle the emergency exit door as they realise they are about to be spending two weeks in close proximity with those they spend the other 50 weeks of the year avoiding. Then there is the pre-holiday stress of all those calculations - how many weeks to go and then how many days. But stress is not the same as the blues; the holiday blues are a state of dissatisfied mind as, in essence, the holiday is also a state of mind. It is a state of mind of suspended reality and the blues are the return-to-reality dissonance; how can one reconcile that unreality with the grinding normality of everyday life? The response is to shrug the shoulders, say cheerily but unconvincingly that there is always next year and then head off to Tesco and search for the bottle of wine that had been a holiday companion, as though some form of memento can keep alive the holiday. It is like a bereavement; the aching sensation of loss. We can't get it out of our minds, however hard we try, and so we start counting the weeks - 50, 49, 48. The year becomes determined by the pinnacle of the fortnight, and so we wish our lives away in order to get to that pinnacle as swiftly as possible, undeterred by the fact that the holiday is but one twenty-sixth of the year; the other 25 are those of unending normality. Maybe it would be better if we didn't go on holidays.

What it all really means, and most won't admit it as they would end up going crazy is surely there is something rather better than the drudgery of back home. And so the holiday blues continue because holiday is something better. The holiday destination takes on an almost spiritual dimension; it provides a stopping-off point on the search for whatever "it" is, like Kerouac's "On The Road". As with many other things, such as sitting all day in front of a computer, humans weren't made for holidays; they weren't in the initial grand design brochure of a bit of hunting and gathering and a mere survival instinct. Unfortunately someone overlooked the power of reason. Blame who you will - philosophers such as Descartes or Sartre or the peddlers of holiday from Mr. Thomas Cook to Billy Butlin to Cliff Michelmore and Judith Chalmers and to Stelios - but holiday has become a kind of leitmotif of the human capacity to conceptualise existentialist escapism: I think therefore I'll go on holiday. Someone also overlooked the power of dreams and the striving to actualise these dreams. The brochures tell us that they are attainable - dream islands, dream beaches and so on - but they are all too fleetingly within our grasp before the transfer coach to the airport pulls up outside the hotel and the dreams are shattered. Then the tears start. And so the holiday blues kick in and another form of reasoning begins - what if the holiday destination, the one with which such a strong bond has been formed, became the reality? There are those who have come to Alcúdia and to Pollensa on holiday and have returned to live the dream. The only problem is that, for some, the dream is not what the brochure of the imagination said it was.


AMA FESTIVAL AND CHILL-OUT
Just a note to say to check out the listings on the WHAT'S ON BLOG for the AMA Festival for women's awareness happening in Pollensa this weekend and the complementary chill-out sessions on the Cala Carbó beach in Cala San Vicente from tomorrow through till Sunday. Loads of DJs and live music in the evenings for the Pollensa events and the Cala stuff sounds very very worth going to.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Jimi Hendrix (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOrpuw1J9Og). Today's title - someone hated something - who were they?

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