On holiday with Socrates

This post is an entry to the Tots100/Al Fresco Holidays competition. Thomson Al Fresco offer holidays in "luxury mobile homes in Europe's best parcs", and you can visit their website by clicking here.

Why do we go on holiday anyway? It’s a big part of life for us Brits, but it’s not the same in all cultures. After our first summer living in the US, I was surprised to discover that most families hadn’t been on holiday. Going away in the summer just isn’t an expectation, a normal thing to do, as it is for us. I don’t want to be critical of Americans, but I do think they’re missing out.

It’s not just the chance to experience a new place, a different culture, unfamiliar foods. It’s not just the opportunity to spend more time with family or friends, or pursuing a favourite activity. No. It’s the time in the year when we rest, relax and reflect. Socrates said “The unexamined life is not worth living”. In my book, holidays are those times when our lives are examined.

I deliberately put that sentence in the passive, because I don’t mean that we need to sit around in some philosophical fug, reading weighty tomes and pondering deep cogitations. Sometimes our lives can be ‘examined’ by little nudges here and there which tell us important things, if only we will listen. It might be that you remember how much you really, really love running around outside with your kids, and that thought will motivate you to make time to go to the park on a Saturday morning when you get home. Or perhaps you’ll dare admit to yourself a sense of restlessless, a needing to move on, which will prompt you to look for a new challenge. Or maybe you’ll just realize that your life is full of good things, and the break will deliver you back to ‘normal life’ less anxious and more grateful.

I remember our first holiday with a baby, in 1997. He was three months old. My husband and I were living in London, and house-sat for a week in Brighton. I took my usual holiday fare – a stack of paperbacks. I returned home having finished not even one of them. That was a Socrates moment. Life was different with a baby (duuuuh…) We went on the Bluebell steam railway – because obviously a three month old baby can fully appreciate steam railways. That was the other side of the coin of lost paperback time. It was a taste of the years ahead of family-orientated outings, of being one of those lucky people who I’d so often seen, pottering along a railway platform at a snail’s pace, a small hand in their own, their enjoyment of the day wrapped up in the excitement of the diminutive railway enthusiast attached to that small hand.

Here is my favourite photo from that holiday. I do have pictures of the steam train, and the beach, and the South Downs, but I like this one, staged with our poor innocent unsuspecting firstborn. It speaks of the process of adjusting to parenthood.

Take Socrates on holiday with you. He would have approved of holidays, I think.




.