It's that time of the year, at least if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, where people pack up their bags and take off on holiday for a week or two. I'm no different, in a way, as I'm coming to the end of my own seasonal break.
Other people I know are going to the South of France, to Crete and Spain. All to lie around in the sun all day, a matter on which I have to concur with Bill Hicks of it being a complete waste of time. As a kid, once dad had worked his way up the career ladder a little bit, I got took away on these kinds of holidays and they were the most boring points of my childhood.
"Oh, you miserable git!" I get told. "Complaining about having a holiday. I bet they were other kids in your school who would have loved that!"
No doubt, and I wish my mam and dad had took them instead. As soon as I was old enough, I opted out and for my summer holiday aged 15, I went down to my auntie and uncle's place in Milton Keynes and mainly played Championship Manager with my cousin. That I found this an infinitely better use of my time tells you how I feel about spending days on the beach. Somewhat tragically, the two of us can still recall our campaigns in great detail to this day.
A holiday to me these days means a week travelling to see my parents, in which I tend to sleep till eleven most mornings, then mooch around the old town a bit and spend the rest of the time catching up on my gaming and going to the pub quiz with my dad. It's not much in the way of excitement, but it feels enough for me.
But is it? I always have the nagging feeling I should be doing more with my leave days. My trip to LA was about the only real holiday I've had as an adult, and the two weeks that involved is the longest time I've had off work. A big part of me would like to see the great cities of Europe, like Paris, Prague and Berlin. I'd really love to visit Japan and I have friends in Canada and Australia that I should get round to visiting. The latter is somewhere I've long wanted to visit (several generations of my family on the paternal side migrated there, so I guess it's a genetic pull to the other side of the world) but issues get in the way.
Or perhaps make that "issue", it being the contradiction in my head of wanting to check out more of the world up against a brain that goes into meltdown whenever my usual routine is broken, or I find myself in new places with new people. How I managed to keep it together to get out to California I don't know, but perhaps the excitement and anticipation of the experience overcame the rest.
Of course, I need to tell myself that this would be the case if I went anywhere else, to stop saying "maybe next year" and sort my sorry excuse for a mental state out and get doing things before all the oil runs out and we're back relying on horse and cart to get around.
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