I’m on holiday! Yeahhh but hang on….. so why am I writing this stuff today? There are a few reasons I suppose but it has encouraged me think about, “What is a holiday?” It is a fairly new thing for the working classes from which I hail (yes I am part agricultural labourer and part miner). I mean my Great Grandparents wouldn’t have gone on holiday. Well not like the ones we all talk of.
Of course, and no I didn’t look this up, holiday comes from ‘Holy Day’. You know, it was when we serfs were given a day off to sit in Church. It was where students of the future learned to sit in large groups, looking at a boring man (the vicars/priests were always men then) and appear to be awake and interested but were really sleeping.
From this we gained both holidays and lectures. Holydays are now not taken in Church, just away from the field of our toil and lectures are done online where we can put up an icon in place of our actual face and sleep just like all the folks used to way back when, when they were talked at for an hour or more by a chap in frightening white robes who spoke in Latin.
Anyway, I am taking some time away from the Paint Emporium and travelled to the Norfolk Broads and yet here I am still doing something which could be deemed as work. There are various gurus who would encourage us to have a small holiday everyday and to be honest, I quite like this idea, so lets explore this a little further.
I may change my mind in the future but I don’t like the concept of ‘retirement’ and holidays are sort of in the same place. I think we should live all of our lives learning and, as much as possible, enjoy our work, rest and play. I appreciate that for many of us, work isn’t something we do for fun, we do it because we have to keep running around that ‘wheel’ and put food on the table. We do it so that we can go on holiday! So we go to these temples of torture to pay to have time away from the place – Hmmmmm. Yes, I am sitting here, at the moment in my caravan, with my chin resting on my palm looking thoughtful and a little pensive as I contemplate this. 
So, I do the work I don’t like doing in order to travel and do the work I do like doing. Mmmmm…….
I am thinking of scrapping the term holiday for me. This means I don’t have to go and sit in a church and listen to someone talk about something I am fairly sure is not of interest to me. I can also shed this view that in my life, that the only time I can enjoy my is when I go on holiday for however many weeks the ‘Evil Baron’ (or Baroness) allows me to be happy. I wonder whether holidays should really be called ‘Happydays’ but then does that mean I can only be happy when I book a Happyday? I suppose that this is why the ‘Fun Police’ that run ‘work’ have changed the term we should use when we request time away to ‘Annual Leave’. This is because they want us to have time off to be miserable as well as go to Church (or whatever your worship place is called).
Anyway, back to writing and me being on what I am now terming as ‘Kay’s Grand Tour 2022’. Rich folks like Byron used to do Grand Tours to learn about other cultures. They used it to buy lots of Italian furniture and write poetry, I think. I am not planning to buy any furniture on my ‘Grand Tour’ but if I did, it is unlikely to be Italian as I am in Norfolk as we speak. I will take the writing bit though, although not the poetry for this reason:
There once was a wild girl from Norwich
Who rowed her boat along a green ditch
She loved to watch the birds duck and dive
And the bees zooming searching for their hive
When all she was striving for was the perfect pitch
I am not sure poetry is my talent (as you can see) but I don’t want a holiday or annual leave from writing or learning. It brings me pleasure and I don’t need a break from enjoying pleasurable experiences. So myself and my writing assistant (Pip the Puppy) will keep tapping and scribbling as we take our Tour in the ‘Far East.
