I have always understood that June to September is very quiet for academics. The undergraduates go home and on to Glastonbury or V or Bestival. This allows their teachers to go to places with a lot of sun and plentiful cheap wine to write up research or to think. In contrast, since I became an academic in 2009, each summer has been exponentially more frenetic. I promise others that the very large number of things that I have neglected to do during the rest of the year will be completed during the quiet season, which consequently is anything but quiet. Nonetheless, my wife insists that we take a holiday, and I suppose that this is reasonable enough, but rather a lot of trouble.
Over the last few years, I have kept a journal whenever I’m away from home. What follows is based on the journal I kept during our holiday in France in September 2015. Publication has been delayed by two weeks. Since I got back I have been rushing around, finishing stuff in the busy season that I did not complete in the quiet season.
Wednesday
I have always found the run up to holidays extremely stressful. When I was a proper NHS consultant psychiatrist, holidays were preceded by several fraught weeks, a race against time where I tried to clear my in-tray. After 10 days in some distant location, I would relax. Then, on the journey home, I’d get wound up about what might have gone wrong whilst I was away. Occasionally something did go seriously wrong in my absence, but mostly I returned to a replenished in-tray and a lot of people demanding immediate answers to questions, like “where is your coffee money?” or “do you have the spare keys for the defibrillator”. These days I am employed as a mainly ceremonial figure, like Princess Anne or Lenin’s corpse, and the scope for something to go wrong has greatly reduced, though it hasn’t been eliminated. This has had little effect on pre-holiday flap or end-of-holiday apprehension.
As a young man I insisted on doing the holiday driving. I do not like cars and I do not like driving, but I liked to keep occupied to avoid the stress of trying to relax. Terry is perfectly happy to drive and these days she does so. As soon as we are in the car with the music turned up loud, my tension eases.
On this first day of the holiday, we pulled onto the main road with the sun shining and Dub Inc blasting on the stereo. Neither of us is entirely even-tempered, so we avoid the M6, a road that can turn the sunniest mood into homicidal rage in minutes. Instead we meandered down attractive A-roads, only mildly perturbed by white sports cars playing chicken with on-coming traffic.
We stayed overnight with my 87 year-old father. He is in remarkably good shape. He enjoys good food, decent wine, debate about politics and a couple of rounds of golf each week. He is up-to-date on current affairs. He was excited by the prospect of Corbyn leading Labour, and he is re-learning the violin after a 25-year lay off. He took us out for a curry with my sister and her family. She has asked me to speak at a meeting she is organising. The last time she did this, it was not a great success. Now, eleven short years later, she is doing it again. She says I am not to give her a dead leg this time.