One of the most infuriating cases of semantic drift is the word staycation. It was an irritatingly twee portmanteau in the first place, but it did at least serve a useful purpose, describing that thing where you take a few days at work to stay at home and do nothing in particular, maybe take some sandwiches out to the park and read a book under a tree. I am all in favour of this. I make a point of doing it at least once a year.
But now it’s been appropriated by the travel industry to mean “a holiday in the UK”, thereby implying that a holiday that doesn’t involve a flight and a passport isn’t really a holiday, thereby attempting to make those who can’t afford or don’t want to leave the country feel bad about their circumstances or their choices.
I am not having this. If you’re leaving your house and staying somewhere else and doing something enjoyable and not working, it’s a holiday. You’re not telling me that every joyous seaside summer of my childhood was a mere staycation.
I’m not really talking about either of those things in this post, though. I’m talking about the attempt to adopt a mindset that looks something like this:
I live in a place that’s really quite beautiful and really quite interesting, the sort of place that other people visit on holiday. What can I do to appreciate this and make it more than merely my everyday?
I mean, I got an email the other day from a steam train excursions company inviting me to go and look at “the serene beauty of Ely”, so I’m clearly onto something here. And so are they. It does have a serene beauty.
So what does it look like when I don’t, in fact, have to take a train to experience this serene beauty? Mostly, making today the day I get out for a walk/pop into that interesting-looking shop/use the coffee cup I really like/do a very bad sketch of the angel on the Old Palace. Allowing myself to take some time to be interested.
And then: How do I do this when I have a job to do and can’t just skip out to do a two-hour self-guided walk? How can I do this when funds are limited and I can’t eat at the Old Fire Engine House every week? How do I do this when non-working days are occupied with childcare? How do I do this when looking after the house is my responsibility, not that of some briefly-met and charming apartment owner or hotel proprietor? How do I do this, in short, when everything else still needs doing?
And the answer is, as it often is for me, doing what I can in the time available, and paying attention. If I would order a coffee and a pastry and sit at a table and people-watch if I were in, I don’t know, Bordeaux, I can do it in Ely. If we would go to a recommended child-friendly museum abroad – well, Ely’s museum is great, it has an exhibit where you can fill a basket with wooden vegetables, if that’s your thing, and meanwhile I learn about what keeps the landscape around me working (pumps and drainage ditches). One of these years I’m going to walk the labyrinth in Chartres cathedral, but in the meantime there’s a perfectly good one here. At home, I can take my coffee out into the garden for ten minutes, or stand at the kitchen window and watch the birds.
You might very well say that it is easy in Ely, where a wonder of the medieval world is my regular place of worship, where the tourist information centre squats in a house that belonged to a ruler of the nation, where the buildings are made of old brick that glows in autumn sunlight, where there’s a plaque commemorating James Bond’s Little Nellie on the side of the gelateria. You might very well point out that before I lived in Ely I lived in Cambridge, which must be in the top ten UK tourist cities. I’ve been in no danger of running out of things to look at.
And I would say, yes, and before Cambridge I lived in Woking (“ugh, Woking“, say colleagues), which is generally agreed to be an uninteresting commuter town in the South East – and, because I have been trying to live like this for a long time, I found interesting things there too. Woking is where the Martians land in The War of the Worlds. Once I cycled out to find the place identified in the book (it isn’t right in the centre, where the magnificent tripod sculpture stands). There’s the site of Anne Boleyn’s palace. There’s the country’s first mosque. There was an unexpected cycle race that sparked a decade-long enthusiasm for the sport. And apart from all that, I explored, I walked down streets to see what there was at the other end, I kept my eyes open. I could do that anywhere.
Julia Cameron advises taking time every week for an “artist date” – not to create art, not necessarily to experience it (though you might do), but just to fill up on colour and taste and sound and smell, to encounter something other than the inside of one’s own head, to be able to return to one’s creative work refreshed and enthused and replenished. That is part of what I’m doing here, I think.
And of course it also makes me more at home. When I follow these streets, I get to know these streets, I get to recognise my neighbours. When I know my town, I can share my town.
Do I succeed all the time? Of course not. There are plenty of days where it’s back to back meetings and lunch is a sandwich in front of the computer, and if I go into town it’s a frantic errand for a box of eggs and I don’t spare a thought for Oliver Cromwell as I dash into the Co-op opposite his house. Often the holiday at home isn’t even an aspiration, let alone a reality. But when I manage it, I enjoy it.
