An Air Conditioned Nirvana
If your mind is turning to travel right now, you're not alone. But what is the true value of a holiday? And why do we even travel at all? PLUS: Find out where true insiders escape to
I’ve been thinking about holidays a lot recently, and how, over time, they become a series of snapshots that sit in the filing cabinets of our mind. Every trip we have taken, every flight we have endured, becomes compressed into something far richer than the experience itself, ready to be whipped out when occasion calls for it. Holidays in Greece are remembered only as the moment you found a deserted taverna on the water’s edge, rather than the noise, and the dust and the exasperated donkeys who made you weep into your kebab each night. A trip to Yorkshire brings to mind only green, muscular hills with beamed pubs that still serve jam roly-poly. You blank out the rain. And the mud. And the 15 km walk that had you wailing into the sky.
This is really a holiday’s job. To offer us a way through. Nothing fills us with as much optimism or excitement as a holiday soon to be taken. And, truth be told, nothing soothes quite as well as a holiday remembered either. A holiday is hope in an Expedia booking. It is the knowledge that there is something better waiting for you at the end. Even the idea of a holiday can get you through a crushing day at work, or the blackest British morning in January. That’s why armchair travel is its own hobby. And why travel journalism is so beloved. It is why, Daunt books in Marylebone (if you’ve never been, you should) categorises its vast travel section not by discipline - because who spends time in the ‘maps section’ anymore - but by country.
Often, if I am passing through, I go in there simply to be surrounded by the spines of books that read things like: ‘A heart lost in Florence’ or ‘Italian meatballs and madness’. And then, just like that, I am back in a land of steepled churches, warmed earth and young men who look at you like you’re a piece of Wagyu.