There are some days on holiday that sound impressive when you describe them afterwards. Long walks and new scenery. Training for the annual Ironman triathlon. Spectator training, obviously.
And then there are days like today, where your main achievement is shuffling your sun bed sideways to stay in the shade. Madam takes sun bed acquisition with the seriousness of a military operation. I am still having breakfast, and she has walked around the pool, checked every bed and parasol for exactly the right amount of sun and shade. Looked under for the wrong sort of insects. Checked the mattress for suspicious stains. She establishes her preferred position with enough territorial spread to suggest we may be staying permanently and lays out towels and attaches clips to the parasol.
It’s going to be another hot day, 35 degrees Celsius, so I’m happy to do not much of anything.
We are lying by the pool by 9 a.m. The morning settles into a familiar rhythm. I read for ten minutes. I check my phone despite there being absolutely nothing on it worth checking. I finally finish reading The Island. Spoiler: They all die in the end.
I bring books on holiday with good intentions. Holiday reading always sounds aspirational before you leave home. You imagine yourself thoughtfully working through literary classics while gazing occasionally at the blue sky above and thinking deep and profound thoughts. In reality, most of your concentration goes into deciding whether the sun has moved enough to justify shifting the sun bed three inches to the left and wondering if 11am is too early for an ice cream.
The hotel pool is an extraordinary environment when you think about it. Modern human civilisation has essentially agreed that dozens of strangers should gather together around a patch of chlorinated water and spend entire days half-naked, slowly cooking themselves to an unhealthy shade of pink while occasionally lowering themselves into the pool with all the grace of furniture being moved downstairs. Nobody questions this arrangement. We have collectively decided this is pleasure.
Modern life normally encourages us to be constantly occupied, our attention spans shrinking by the year. Learn a foreign language. Read your emails. Count your steps. First, of course, actually do some steps worth counting. Take the dog to the beach. Clean the bathroom.
Meanwhile, the hotel pool offers a very different philosophy. Perhaps lying motionless for several hours while vaguely considering what book to start, or whether to drink another hot chocolate in thirty-degree heat, is quite enough achievement for one day.
The ancient Greeks would probably have approved of this philosophy completely. Though they’d almost certainly have demanded better parasols.
Travels With Madam 