‘Is there ever a holiday so heavenly that one is not counting down the days?’ a friend texted me last summer, homesick in the Loire valley. Another French friend messaged me last week from Montreal on day five of a holiday which, she was now regretting, she’d booked to last for nine days. She too was counting down. Having recently returned from a fortnight in Cambodia with four extra days in Hanoi tacked on at the end, I counted down in sympathy. Those final four days, from Saturday morning till her flight back home on Tuesday night, seemed to drag on for ever, over a desolate weekend – and I wasn’t even there in the characterless Airbnb flat among the skyscrapers and crack addicts.
‘I’m longing to see that tray of food in the plane,’ she texted. ‘The plastic tray I’d usually despise takes on a glow of light.’ With its refrigerated bread roll and rock-hard butter-pat, that tray symbolised the homeward journey.
For those of us of a home-loving persuasion, I don’t think there are any foreign holidays when we’re not secretly counting down. However beautiful the castles, delicious the breakfast pastries and cloudless the sky, by day four we’re secretly working out how many days there are still to go and being grateful that we’re 24 hours further on than we were this time yesterday. After my return from South-East Asia, it was pure schadenfreude to watch the BBC’s new vapid eight-parter Two Weeks in August, in which a group of self-obsessed millennials on a villa holiday in Greece neglect their children and crash their lives in search of self-fulfilment over a very long fortnight.
