In the summer of 1968 I was holed up with my cousin in my parents’ house on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border. We were both in our early twenties, low on funds and single. I might have said that we were “house-sitting”, but I never heard that expression until several years later. We spent the time fell-walking and reading with occasional trips to the pub and to football matches once the season started. Having read some of Rousseau’s Confessions one morning and walking during the afternoon I achieved a state of clarity about certain ideas which went on to serve me extremely well in terms of publications and in many other respects. It was odd that Rousseau was such a help because I don’t rate him highly, but not odd that my cousin was because we knew each other so well that we didn’t bother to converse much while walking. I guess a substantial proportion of academics and authors will recognise the moment: it happens when you go down a certain hill on a bicycle or (famously) when you sit in your mother’s garden watching the apples fall off the trees.

But was I on holiday at the time? It may seem an obviously silly question, but it’s a necessary one if you regulate academic employment as if it were normal employment. Most anglophone universities stipulate somewhere between 26 and 30 days holiday or vacation for employees not including national statutory holidays, but what does this mean and does it actually affect anyone’s behaviour? In researching this matter I found statements such as this, “no academic at any institution I’ve ever worked at in the US would be allowed to take six continuous weeks of vacation . . . . it would be considered absurd.” Yet when I started work on a full-time salary in 1969 the assumption was that you weren’t required to turn up in any of the 22 weeks of vacation unless there was a good reason and a particular task to perform. And, yes, I did tend to go travelling for six weeks or more. Only much later did administrators try to change the language of the calendar by referring to what I called the summer vacation as the “fourth term”.

Attitudes to holidays vary as much as anything can in human culture. I have met people who boast that they haven’t had a holiday (or “vacation”) in five years. By contrast my own boastfession is that I have been on holiday approximately 500 times. Of course, it all depends on what you mean by a holiday and the starting point must be the definition used when Social Trends began producing statistics on holidays in 1970: four nights away from home for primarily recreational purposes. They discovered that half the population never went on holiday, but that a substantial minority went on multiple holidays; the figure for no holidays is now down to about a third.

It follows that a great deal hangs on what you mean by “recreation” and that is dependent on taste. For me a holiday always needs a sporting dimension in the sense that some cultural sociologists have required as a necessary condition of sport that there must be a “narrative of risk and achievement”. Forgetting airport problems for a moment, you go to a hotel, eat your meals and lie in the sun there’s nothing worth narrating, minimal risk and zero achievement. On a cricket tour or at a conference there’s a tale to tell. Actually of those two I have a precise figure for cricket tours befitting the precision we expect from cricket narratives: I went on 26 cricket tours. I have no figure for conferences, but it must be in the hundreds. Family holidays would also be in the hundreds because we took to going away in the half terms as well. For the record, I spoke strongly against “reading weeks” in university term time on educational grounds, but when I lost this battle I noted that students casually referred to them as “half term” or “the holiday” and I was off; you can read anywhere. The fact is I would prefer to get three successive ducks on a cricket tour or get drenched on a mountain or have my offering slated at a conference than to have no narrative. I have also been on courses, though the best were when I was a second lieutenant in what was then the Territorial Army. The “arduous training course” at Derring Lines Camp in Brecon left me feeling the best I’ve ever felt and somewhere in Dorset I was challenged to cut a car in half with a high velocity machine gun a quarter of a mile away. I succeeded and the sergeant major commented in a strong Ulster accent, “So now you’ve finally found something better than sex, sir.” I was paid for doing that!

There have been hundreds of family holidays, hundreds of conferences and guest lectures (don’t know how many, but I can get to more than two dozen countries), sporting tours and expeditions, long distance walks, city breaks, business trips “selling” the university . . . surely getting close to the 500 mark? And it’s not just that I need the narrative, it is also the case that academic travel allowed recreational possibilities that more conventional business travel did not. I have a neighbour who went to Beijing exactly a dozen times, but never saw the Forbidden City because he was there to talk about power stations. Whereas with conferences in interesting places there were often social events and tourism laid on and most people, including the notoriously industrious Americans, could take a few days off.

I could probably debate for hours with surviving teammates as to the best cricket tour we ever went on, but I have no doubt whatsoever about the best conference. It was the Joint Sessions of Workshops of the European Consortium for Political Research in Barcelona in 1985. I arrived early to arrange accommodation for friends in those pre-internet days and, having completed my task, sat in a cafe in the Placa de Catalunya to watch the world go by. There were a smattering of youths with radios to their ears which steadily grew to a multitude and by the time Barcelona FC had won in Vallalodid to clinch their first league title since the death of Franco there were more than half a million people on the streets. The rest of the week was a fiesta with conferees entertained generously every night by the university, the stock exchange, the Alcalde and the government of Catalonia. My wife came out and we went to the home game against Gijon which was a continuation of the party and a celebration of Catalan culture.

At the same time Spain was formally joining the EEC and this was a city in a festive mood of a kind I’ve never seen before or since. As Barcelona’s manager was an Englishman (Terry Venables – “El Tel”) the English were particularly welcome. I remember aspects of those times very clearly. But I have no recollection of what my workshop was about nor of what I gave a paper on. So it was primarily a holiday in the end? Well not really because the conversations and the background reading which took place about football and Catalan identity inspired an academic interest in the politics of sport which is still an important part of my life forty years on.

Ultimately, those of us who see ourselves as having an intellectual rather than an organisational purpose never really know whether we’re on holiday or not. So the precise regulation of holiday time, if it has to exist, is probably best ignored.

Lincoln Allison August 2024

(An edited version of this article was published in Times Higher Education in August 2024.)