A Word in your ear

Time Out

My daughter sent me a wonderful globe of the world for my birthday. On it all the mountain ranges are ridged, so you get a real sense of terrain as well as distance.  With my fingers on that globe I learn things I’ve never known before. I spend hours locating places in the news, places I had visited. France. Italy. Greece. Boston. Singapore. New Zealand.

And I am thinking how our notion of holidays has changed. Taking ‘time out’, now such a common and varied preoccupation, used to consist of planning your holiday and getting to the train or the plane on time, complete with bucket and spade or sun-block and shades. Holidays always happened in midsummer when the schools and the businesses took a synchronised break.

In South Durham we had something called Factory Fortnight – last week in July, first in August - where all the biggest factory employers in the area shut up shop. Everyone, from the MD to the floor-sweeper took their holidays at this time. The destinations would be as far afield as Lanzarote and Torquay. The Spanish Costas were very popular. One group of mates from a factory I know would tow their caravans all the way down to Torquay and park on the same camp-site and holiday in the comfortable company of people they knew.

In those days my husband and I had our best ever Factory Fortnight on Lake Maggiore in Italy, visiting the gardens and islands on that glittering lake on ferries that always ran on time. We saw no-one we knew, except Maureen Lipman. And we only knew her from the television.

Things are different now. Many families still take the high summer camping or hotel holidays with kids, but for some Disneyland Europe or USA is a family destination worth taking the children out of school for. One working family I know save hard to go to Florida every single year, so much do they feel at home with Mickey Mouse. 

Of course Europe is still a popular destination: quick cheap flights make it the first choice for short extra breaks in search of culture and cuisine, or for riotous hen and stag bonding week-ends. But somehow these are seen as different from real holidays.

For real ‘time out’ these days it’s stylish to go short-haul to the USA and Canada, or long-haul to Singapore, Bangkok, Dubai, Sydney, New Zealand.  Such holidays take more time and would never fit in to Factory Fortnight and could miss school holidays. So the whole year becomes a holiday pick-and-mix for which factories, businesses and schools have had to develop a strategy of permissions and vetos.

Now the most exciting evolution of ‘time out’ is the notion of gap years. A gap-year is the long, long travelling (and occasionally working) holiday, commonly but not exclusively taken by young people before or after their higher education.

The gap year is widely approved of as character-forming. In fact recent research by Andrew King at the University of Surrey seems to show that the experience of a gap-year allows young people to negotiate a more grown up relationship on their return. This makes sense. Surviving that final shredding of the umbilical cord, that snipping of the apron strings, that aching homesickness, that standing on your own feet, is bound to make you grow up. One piquant aspect of this is that you might return more grown up than your parents.

But really this is not new. People in my generation had this same severance experience going to college a long distance from home without the option of returning. Others experienced it when conscripted at eighteen and sent to Germany or outer Aldershot to do their National Service. Then too, you came home ready to renegotiate a more grown up relationship.

For me, the best idea now is this growing custom of more mature people taking a gap year. I have friends who, in their early thirties, gave up their jobs, sold their cars, rented out their house, and went trekking in India and Nepal for a year. They came back with bulging notebooks and colourful memories and a wider context to judge the rest of their lives.

Other friends, early retired, were miraculously creative with their shoestring budget to ensure that every year they went on three month journeys all over the world. One day, travelling round New Zealand, they spotted a little wooden house by the ocean. The next day they bought it. These days they spend the winters by that ocean and the summers in South Durham. While here, of course, they might flip across to Prague or Paris for the odd cheap-oh week-end. Oh, and in October before they return to new Zealand they are going to trek in Nepal…

Me? Well, this year I am drawn back for the second time to an ancient port in the South of France to stay in the atmospheric 13th Century house of the former mayor of that city. The house and the town are full of mystery, drenched in stories. As a writer most of my journeys - much of my ‘time out’ - is in my imagination. It was the same when I was little, on bucket-and-spade days out in Seaton Carew. It will be so when I sit in that old house in France and feel the voices of the past talking to me.