All I want from a holiday is for it to be warm enough for me to sit outside in the evening and play guitar while other people talk around the dinner table on the terrace. That’s all I want. I also want to sit around that same table during the day, while people are talking or reading or whatever, so I can draw and paint them in my sketchbook. That’s all. And before dinner, I want everyone to join me in a game of cards. And after dinner, I want to open a really nice bottle of wine and have someone really funny make me laugh. At some point in the holiday, I want us all to crowd around the tiny television and watch The Sound of Music on VHS, ok, like we used to. And I want there to be a subtle but motivating competition to see who can read the most books in two weeks - the trashier the better, ok, all are valid, but double points for russian literature, anything ‘of the canon’, or over 500 pages. And I am going to need to look pretty busy with something while a bunch of other people are cooking dinner but I can and am willing to smash the washing up as long as it’s with the funny person I plan to drink wine with imminently. I don’t need the ocean or a river, ok, a pool is perfectly fine. And I will need at least an hour every other day, alone or with one like-minded individual, to really browse the supermarket, really take my time identifying different brands than the ones available at home, really try to figure out which shampoo will be my signature shampoo for this trip, yes? Do you understand??
A few years into mine and GJ’s relationship, we decided it was time for us to take an adult holiday - by adult I mean grown-up rather than…anything else that might mean.
We chose Greece, for no reason in particular. Ten days of guaranteed sunshine near water. Simple. You’d think. We aaagonised over where to stay – how to get there, what car to rent, whether we could walk to a restaurant, who to invite to come join us for a few days. It’s when I first learnt that GJ was a maximalist thinker, meaning he has to explore Every. Single. Option. To. Its. Full. Potential. And I, in spectacular contrast, am a minimalist thinker, meaning “this seems fine”. It means his computer has fifty tabs open, and though I am sitting in front of mine, it has run out of battery. As he went about furiously opening tabs like a rushing gene mutation, it dawned on me that this opposition between us could only have shown itself in this way. For the entirety of our relationship up to this point, he had managed his life, and I had managed mine. Our administrative necessities had never overlapped. He moved into my flat because I wanted to live there; he cooked our food because he wanted to eat that. Now, of course, two children down, we live almost entirely in a state of administrative co-operation. And as the countdown begins to our first child starting school next year, as yet unsure as to where we will live, the tabs are off the scale.
Shortly after this trip to Greece, appalled by the excess of admin, the excruciating negotiation of thought processes required for GJ and I to conjure a shared vision, let alone the astonishing cost of the thing, I began the annual practice of writing my parents a thank-you note for all the holidays we went on as children: The simplicity, the peace, the good company they always orchestrated for us – we were nearly always joined by at least one other family with children of companionable age. We usually took a villa in France or Italy, inland somewhere, with a swimming pool. One of my most vivid memories of childhood holidays is my father lying on the ground in France, my cousin Lara and I resting our heads on his chest and staring up at the night sky, ablaze with stars, serenaded by a hymn of evening crickets, trying to spot satellites. It was simple, few excursions, maybe one meal at a restaurant.
My notes, since becoming a parent, now include the acknowledgement that for most of the 25 years that they were joined by their children (my sisters being six and eight years older than me) on holiday, the whole affair was presumably closer to an exercise in self-sacrifice than an opportunity to recalibrate. From keeping us from falling in the pool as children to picking us up from bars in town as teenagers – we hadn’t the faintest fucking clue how lucky we were.
But what really, really blows my mind is that they organised all those trips without the internet. No psychotic number of tabs open. No ridiculous micro-investigations of the square mile surrounding the potential destination. No reading Google reviews of the local restaurant or wild swimming spot. No price comparison for car rental. No exhaustive list of flight times. Long drives without screens or gps. And perhaps most importantly, no airbnb. I refuse to capitalise the name of this wicked institution. I despise airbnb. I curse its hideous nomenclature and all the IKEA-clad, spot-lit, blunt-knifed, unlived in wretchedness it has brought upon the world.
When I first began using the platform to book myself outhouses to stay in after shows in towns and cities across America, it hadn’t yet transformed into its terrible final form. These were places generally run by people who liked the idea of providing a traveller’s rest and perhaps enjoyed the slightly exhibitionist feeling of exposing the eclectic interiors they had cultivated over time. I never feared a review, giving or receiving, because our expectations of each other were matched – we agreed that I would be paying them money to intrude on their space, they were to be hospitable, and I was to be gracious. I loved experiencing the broad range of taste which each town represented: a tiny little cabin in the woods on the edge of Nevada City with cast iron pans and a crocheted bedspread; an incredible four-poster bed in the room I rented in an old lady’s lavishly furnished Victorian mansion in Louisville, intricate lace doilies on every surface; the artist’s studio in Brooklyn which sat atop a fire station, one room containing a half finished canvas and an entire wall dedicated to the storage of their essential oils – that’s how much faith was once placed in the exchange.
The problem with airbnb was built in to its structure – a review system that eventually broke the hearts and souls of any space with a heart and soul, leaving a void which was swiftly filled by the very worst kind of late capitalism; The same kind that gave us cheap air travel and means you can barely ever hail a cab. We swapped something dignified for something mortified. Something that was a treat into something that is a threat. They all told us we deserved more of these leisures in our life and in the process drained them of all possible leaisurable experience. It was all a giant bait and switch. I deleted uber years ago, I don’t fly if i can help it and given how much flying I have done for my work and how many guitars I travel with, I refuse to put myself through the indignity of low cost airlines. And I have now finally closed the door on airbnb. The holiday from which we recently returned was the final nail in the coffin. I nearly went out with a bang, briefly hovering a finger over the publish button of one of my finest artist achievements: an honest review of my experience and a colourful takedown of the platform as a whole. As with so many grievances, simply writing down was sufficient enough of an exorcism, and so I bravely stood down.
The experience got me thinking about how much nostalgia is woven into the expectation one places on that precious two weeks of the summer – especially now, as a family. When I was growing up, as for most, it was the only two weeks of the year we were all together as a family. We each took our leisure: My dad would walk off into the countryside with his watercolouring back pack and pick his spot he would return to paint every day; my sisters would choose there spot by the pool and stack of books to read and cds to listen to. When I was younger my principal activity would be choosing the animal or insect I intended to stalk obsesively. My happiest memories though are condensed into the years in which I briefly drifted into an age bracket in which I could be accommodated into the world my sisters and their friends occupied; a period of maybe two or three years, before they ceased joining us on holiday. In those years my friends and their friends integrated and days spent laughing by the pool turned into evenings spent drinking cheap wine, smoking and being permitted to get up to mischieve right under the nose of our parents. It was tame, as I’m sure is obvious, but it was meaningful – all these worlds, that usually passed each other by in their usual orbit on there routes around the sun of family life, aligned there on those warm evenings in the tuscan countryside. My father and his friends passing guitars around, my mother and god mother roaring with laughter, my sisters and their friends talking to me like I was one of them.
This was a different time – I hate to spell it out, but a world before phones. A time where most of the people you grew up with could afford to buy a house and start a family and go on a european holiday once a year. All the nostalgia brought on by this intense reminiscing about family holidays got me wondering what leisure really means now. Part of what irks me about airbnb is that your tie to your technology is baked into the experience. I spent the two weeks mostly terrified of getting a bad review and pitifully aquiscing to our insane hosts requests to intrude on our holiday for one reason or other. All I want is to pay someone a reasonable amount of money for a semi-shithole house I’m not afraid of scratching, filled with books, one vhs of The Sound of Music, some nice wine, a pool, a view and for everyone else to fuck off so I can be with my family.
What I realise now, is this is what I want from life. I don’t want it for two weeks of the year. Part of my concern about the future of living in London is that even if I was significantly richer than I am now, I could still not afford a house in which a could comfortabley have my family to stay. And that’s all I want. Really, that’s all I want.
Fair to say you're not alone in that yearning, and you may be in a state where realizing that dream is much more attainable than it is for most, simply by dint of having your family/close circle more or less geographically colocated with you. I upped and moved my life from Delhi to Brooklyn some fifteen years ago, while my then-girlfriend-now-wife moved hers from Wisconsin to join me in our little studio apartment as I started grad school. Here we are, all these years later, now with a toddler in our midst. She's growing up watching her grandparents on either side on FaceTime calls every day. One grandma can visit every few months and the other set fly in once a year while their health lets them. Meanwhile, my wife's best friend lives in Copenhagen, and mine live in Seattle, Toronto and London.
What I wouldn't give to get all these people to live close to us, wherever it may be... My Seattle friend has a kid a few months older than mine whom I've still never met. My own will hopefully have a set of friends who are less likely to uproot and move half-way across the world, but yes, like you, I spend an inordinate amount of time wishing for a simpler life that I guess I was never destined to have. I'm not complaining; I made the choice to move across the world and on the balance, my life and my parents' is better for it financially, if nothing else.
Speaking of airbnb (lowercase in solidarity), we are traveling to London in 3 days (to see my London friend) and then to Copenhagen (you can guess why) and I deliberately booked an "aparthotel" in London over airbnb because I would rather have the guarantee of paid staff managing my stay than the whims of a random host. We also used airbnb back in the day when it was a great alternative to hotels and in fact, spent our honeymoon staying in rooms in people's apartments in Rome and Venice because that was all we could afford. It was great. Now, if I can get a place with a kitchen and some space for toddler in a hotel, I'm choosing that 100% of the time over an airbnb. Capitalism ruins everything.
Separately, if you have toddler-friendly activity recs for London, I'm here for it.
Such evocative writing.
Thoroughly enjoyable reading.
Thank you. 🙂