We're not going on holiday this summer, so I thought I'd remind myself what I'm missing. Nietzsche talks of the enchantment of short-term habits. When I think how excited I get mastering another place's bus timetables, I know he's right.
Some of the joy comes simply from being away from home. Because the landscape is different, your eyes wake up. Because the food tastes different, your palate is tickled into making new distinctions. Whether or not the language is familiar, your ears enjoy the challenge of a different sound world.
You can lose yourself in the music of foreign streets—car horns, scooters, trams, even horses' hooves. It's almost a definition of being in the Mediterranean that you don't mind the noise. Even the birds sing a different tune, so you get interested in birdwatching. The vegetation is more luxurious, so add to that plantspotting. You wake up with foreign words in your head. You cover your face with a different kind of detective story on the beach, which has to be read with a dictionary, and it doesn't really matter that you never get beyond page three.
Wherever you go, they have different styles of travelling by train, different ways of setting out their banks, different ideas of where to put bus tickets on sale and, in their stations and bars, extra-clean loos for women opened with keys that need to be fetched from the bar.
Being on holiday is different from being at home, but mostly only in comfortable, picturesque ways. Cats start behaving like the wild beasts of prey they really are, while dogs shrink to the role of status symbols. Both provide a pleasing spectacle. Most canines in fashion in Europe today are so tiny they look as if they might be blown away by the bora or the mistral, or whatever is the prevailing wind. The cats are rake-thin, scrounge for old pasta and lack all trust in humanity.
Short-term pleasures are often games and illusions, but they are great while they last. There's nothing more holiday-like than sitting in a bar and half understanding the television news in Greek or Portuguese. Other people's politics are fascinating, and the more byzantine they are the better.
Glimpses of the home turf from far off are almost equally exotic. It's a great way of whiling away the short time between the last swim and the first drink, trying to explain the exoticism of life back home to new friends. Yes, really, that's the truth about Blerr, or Blayer, or however the name of our famous prime minister is pronounced; meanwhile, it's difficult to work out what the various local political parties stand for. Europe and Britain have had different histories since the last war. But by joining Europe on our holiday sojourns and chatting our way through the differences, we feel we're doing our best to bring mutual understanding closer.
Faintly plausible dreams make the best holidays. We walk around in a trance of happiness at the possibility of swapping old habits for new and becoming more relaxed, more beautiful, sexier, multilingual, cosmopolitan. At the same time, we remain the stars of our own show. All the shopkeepers, ticket-sellers, buskers, drivers and waiters who unwittingly line the routes as we stroll through their towns, people who seem to be there for us, are like characters in a dream which only comes to a stop when we wake up and leave.
And yet it has to be said that holidays are slightly, but constantly, unsettling. Not being able to communicate perfectly, not being sure of the way, not quite mastering the small change of a different currency, can add up to a degree of uncertainty. Those inside the eurozone are deprived these days of the fumble over money, but some of us still toggle between shame and the secret pleasure that comes from more easily spending in a currency we can't immediately grasp.
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We elected one Italian bus driver the hero of our last trip. When he got to the end of his route and found us still sitting on the bus, he politely enquired where we lived. We shrugged. We knew where it was but we didn't have the written address. So, having locked up the bus, he steered us towards his car and took us on a night tour around the mountain until, peering through the shadows, we recognised the not yet familiar outline of our rented house. On the way, he asked, why is it so many British people want to come and live here?
Great food, sexy underwear, musical language, people like you, I wanted to say.
If you're a Brit, there's a kind of balancing of the cultural books about holidaying in Europe. It's not only that in France, Spain and Italy they do things differently, it's that they haven't yet turned every human experience into something to sell.
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There's just one drawback—and that's the way they use English. They take our language and turn it, via T-shirt and backpack logos, into some incomprehensible mutant form ("Lost Arch," "Worldwanted Gang"). That was the state of the balance-sheet when we came back last time. Sold: one language. Gained: one relative paradise, almost the same as our life at home, but sunnier and more stylish, and full of pleasing human contact.
