Why I never enjoy going on holiday

This Letter from London is coming from Kardamyli, a small town by the sea in the southeast of Greece. I’m on holiday. Readers who are now rolling their eyes at the thought of yet another account of someone’s “amazing” holiday experience have my sympathy. I feel your pain; there’s nothing worse than the “my amazing holiday” bore.

In the 1970s people who subjected friends to long and tedious slideshows of their holiday snapshots appeared in British sitcoms as the bores next door. Now we don’t project our pics onto our living room walls; we post them on social media. And friends feel obliged to post comments like, “Wow! That looks amazing!” and, “I’m so envious!” But what they’re really thinking is: what a terrible show-off you are.

Holidays remind us that there’s something more to life than success, status and money. But holiday photos are all about success, status and money. Those pictures of happy families on deserted beaches with the beautiful sand and sea look innocent enough. But they have an insidious intent: to show your friends you’re having the holiday they can’t afford.

I’ve never really enjoyed going on holiday, even as a kid. During a stay in the South of France when I was thirteen, my father threatened to divorce my mother after he’d caught her with an ice cream. Had he caught her with another man he wouldn’t have minded but he had become macrobiotic — or as I dubbed him from that day on, macropsychotic — and he could not tolerate such dietary transgressions. I returned from that holiday fearful for the future of my family.

Then there was the holiday in the seaside town of Brighton in 1964. My dad insisted that we go see the battle of the mods and rockers on the seafront. To this day I’m haunted by the sight of a skinny rocker in his leather jacket getting the shit kicked out of him by a dozen mods. The look of fear and humiliation on his bloodied face made me cry, “I wanna go home!”

I’m here in Greece with a great group of friends from London. But there’s one grumpy old bloke who is a total downer: me. Am I really the only one in our group who can float in the beautiful Mediterranean beneath a blue, cloudless sky and have an existential crisis?

I meant to experience Beauty. Wonder. Awe and all that jouissance jazz. Instead I’m thinking: help! My career is dying, my sex life is over and I’m about to be eaten by a shark.

Since I arrived here I’ve been thinking about that film Zorba the Greek (1964). Anthony Quinn played the life-affirming peasant who teaches the uptight intellectual Englishman Basil (Alan Bates) how to let go and embrace life.

When I arrived I felt like a Basil who needed to find my own Zorba. And then I did — and what pain in the ass he turned out to be. My Zorba is not a Greek peasant but an English academic/writer/filmmaker/yoga master/TED speaker and probably the greatest lover in the Western world. He parties all night and swims at dawn. He then writes 5,000 words before breakfast and he sings and dances and hugs everything that moves — he radiates energy and vitality and he drives me nuts. And yet he is the man I long to be.

“Cosmo,” he tells me, “you’re always living on the sidelines of life. Where is your joy? Your rapture?” He puts his arm around my shoulder and looks me straight in the eyes and says, “You need to find your passion, buddy! You need to break free and lose yourself in the zone of life.”

I tell him that the only zone I ever inhabit is the Twilight Zone. (He doesn’t laugh.) These days people are always telling me to find my passion and love it and live it — to which I say: shove it. Some of us just aren’t Big Passion People. We are Little Passion People who enjoy a nice cup of tea and a catchy pop song on the radio. I’m not driven by Dionysian life forces — so shoot me!

What I really enjoy this holiday is dinner with the group, even if they eat at 11:30 p.m. (I hate late eating more than anything.) But if you want to see the crisis of democratic politics in action just watch my friends trying to settle the bill for dinner. It can become a fractious event.

You’d think all you had to do was divide the bill by the number of people who have eaten. Think again. Such pragmatism clashes against people who ask, quite reasonably, why should the person who only had the $10 starter pay the same as the person who had the sea bass that cost $200? And why should I, a nondrinker, subsidize the heavy boozers at the table?

And boy does this lot drink! And smoke! They get totally pissed most nights, go skinnydipping in the sea under the stars and drink and smoke and drink and smoke and get to bed by 2 or 3 a.m. and do it all over the next day! How I envy them. It’s dull being a Basil in a group of Zorbas.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 2024 World edition.