That would be me and, of course, it raises the question of what constitutes a holiday. The Office for National Statistics uses the criteria of four or more nights away from one’s main domicile taken primarily for recreational purposes. I can get to about five hundred provided I am allowed everything including courses, conferences, sports tours, research trips and so forth. My life is lived “for recreational purposes” and I’d much rather have to give a lecture or captain a cricket team than just sit on the beach so every trip can and should be treated as a holiday so far as I am concerned.

I have had every advantage. I am a “boomer” born just after the war and progressed steadily

from family holidays mostly with relatives and family friends and most often in Cornwall (a two day trip from Lancashire in those days) to school trips and family motoring on the continent initially in a Morris Minor. It helped to have a father fluent in French, German and Italian. Then there was a decade of hitch-hiking in the golden age of hitch-hiking. In my prime, in the 1980s, I would in the course of a year go on several family holidays, one cricket tour, several conferences and a number of trips researching various books and articles. Wherever possible trips were multi-purpose. For example I remember going to Northern Ireland to contribute to a discussion on Irish sport, but also to write an article about the Antrim coast. I’m almost embarrassed to say that my academic hosts provided me with not only a car but a chauffeur as well. I’ve even gone on holidays from my holidays: from Singapore to Malaysia and Indonesia, for example and from the USA to Mexico. Latterly semi-educational trips with grandchildren have added a new genre of holiday.

It helped to be an academic with long vacations. I actually spoke and voted against the introduction of “reading weeks” during term in my university, but once outvoted I was off; you can read anywhere. Academic travel – for external examining, guest lectures and papers, conferences, research and for any other reason they can think of could be combined with other purposes. Unlike business travellers we could usually linger. I have a neighbour who went to Beijing twelve times on business and never saw the Forbidden City whereas if someone was paying for me to go somewhere I usually scheduled two to three times as long as the business took to look around. It helped that there were editors who categorised me as a “travel writer”. It also helped that my university appointed me as “South Asia Academic Liaison Officer” and that various other universities and bodies gave me visiting posts: this included the United States, the former Soviet Union, Thailand and Australia. It also helped that nobody else wanted these jobs because after the introduction of formal research assessment into British universities in the late 1980s everybody else seemed to be concentrating on their next publication. What made it even easier (not to mention cheaper) to travel was that my relatives have lived in more than two dozen countries.

Thus I was in the right place at the right time to do a great deal of travelling. At the moment given how hard people work and given, also, the mounting social and environmental problems of travel and tourism, it may well be that few people, if any, will have my opportunities in the future. So what are the best bits and what is to be learned? Two qualifying thoughts before the choices are made: the first is that, looking back, the really long trips didn’t really work in some respects. I have been on round-the-world trips twice, a three month tour of North America, spent summer vacations hitching round the Mediterranean and, though there were some very memorable moments, there is no doubt that one loses freshness and becomes jaded after a while and interest flags. Also, none of these choices will include what Peter Hall classified as “world cities”: London. New York, Paris, Moscow and Tokyo. Certainly, I’d go like a shot to any of them if I’d never been before, but having been I don’t like them. Specifically I don’t like the quality of life in such large and crowded places and I don’t like the way people treat each other. Similar considerations apply to smaller cities with an excess of tourists like Cambridge and Florence. (I’ve worked in both as it happens.)

My first award is an odd one:

BEST REMARK BY A FELLOW TRAVELLER: I was on a train in Southern China. The landscape consisted of three elements – paddy fields, factories and blocks of flats in only a slight variety of juxtapositions. I made a remark to the only other non-Chinese in the carriage, an Irishman (Dubliner by his accent): “Pretty boring landscape.” “Yes,” he replied, “but it’s interesting how boring it is.” A true traveller.

But after that it gets more predictable:

BEST FAMILY TRIP: In 1994 we stretched the Easter holiday into seventeen days and toured the “British Isles” as the Irish don’t like to call them staying in some hotels, but also with friends and relatives. Up to John O’Groats, then down to Girvan and across to Northern Ireland then to my late father-in-law’s abandoned farm in Longford and on to Dublin, climbing Snowdon (which was actually covered in snow) before coming home. Lots of adventures. I still smile when I remember the reaction of the youngest of the family, then aged ten, on being told that we were off to Edinburgh to visit Dad’s friend Willy who lived in Dick Place.

BEST CONFERENCE: European Consortium for Political Research, Barcelona, 1985. Sometimes everything comes together! I flew out early to arrange accommodation for myself and friends. Having done this, I went to the city centre for a Sunday afternoon drink. The first thing I noticed was that there were several youths with radios held to their ears. They were listening to Barca’s away game at Vallalodid and when they’d won they had clinched their first league title since the death of Franco. The manager was an Englishman, Terry Venables. Within an hour there were at least half a million people on the streets and the celebrations continued for many days. Spain was just entering the EEC and the sense of a place entering a new and better era was everywhere. The receptions for conference delegates – hosted by the mayor, the stock exchange, the Catalonian regional government and the university were the best I’ve ever known. My wife flew out and we managed to get tickets for Barcelona’s next home game against Gijon which was a festival of Catalan traditions. We stayed an extra week and explored Catalonia. I should add that I’m not particularly an admirer of Barcelona or Catalonia generally, but to see a large city in a once-a-lifetime celebratory mood was very special.

Incidentally, I know I gave a paper at the conference, but I haven’t a clue as to what it was about.

BEST PACKAGE TOUR: We haven’t done many, but I thought Riviera Travel’s “The Best of Japan” was pretty faultless and included a very well chosen variety of Japanese experiences. I will never forget, for example, meeting a survivor of Hiroshima and hearing her life story or attending different forms of Japanese theatre. This was a case where having everything organised for you was better than any alternative.

BEST COURSE: “Arduous training camp”, Derring Lines army camp, Brecon, Wales. I’m not sure how or why I got on this; I was seventeen and had left school and had not yet joined the (then) Territorial Army. But all those mountains and assault courses left me feeling I was fit to tackle anything. For the record, the army also gave me my worst course. This was tank driving at Bovingdon in Dorset: I wasn’t very good at it and left convinced that if there was ever any prospect of my being involved in a tank battle I would run away and never stop till I reached the horizon.

BEST WALK: I don’t think you can beat England’s Coast to Coast for satisfaction. It’s supposed to be 192 miles long, but by the time you’ve got lost and walked to and from your accommodation most people with modern equipment clock it at about 220 miles. It is though, like the Canterbury Tales because although you walk through wild and deserted countryside you meet many travellers along the way – thirteen days in our case. When we did St. Cuthbert’s Way (Melrose to Lindisfarne, 70 miles, five days) which is also very beautiful but you’re likely to meet nobody.

BEST SPORTS TOUR: Considered as a holiday a traditional sports tour is a high risk affair. You can be dropped, injured, defeated or just perform very badly. Been there, done that in every instance. As sport is a matter for precision I know I’ve been on twenty six cricket tours. Just after I retired at the age of fifty seven I was in Aberystwyth as part of my club’s tour and part of the local cricket festival captaining my team in a round robin tournament winning the decisive game by one run (208-207) off the last ball and the match report stating as fact that my bowling was the decisive factor. And with one of my sons also starring and with never having to work again unless I fancied it . . . Just occasionally high risk means high gain.

BEST HITCH-HIKING: Italy, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Greece etc. 1969. Definitely the most eventful: we had to abort Egypt when there was a coup in Libya and scurry onto the last Kingdom of Libya Airlines flight out of Benghazi. We went to Athens where there had already been a coup and “the colonels” were in charge. Many ex-pats remarked in passing that the North African coast was destined to become the world’s greatest area for tourism. It never happened. Yet?

BEST DEAL: This was called Andalucia Dos, being the number two tour (“ruta”) of the Paradores (state owned Spanish hotels mostly in castles and former monasteries). The format is that you arrange your own transport, which would normally be a hire car, and move between the hotels where you stay one or two nights having paid a composite price for dinner bed and breakfast. Everything was luxurious and our price for seven nights was E715. One of the buildings we stayed in was the Alhambra in Granada where it said on the door that the room price for one night was E415. Sadly, the deal is no longer available.

BEST COUNTRIES: Of course it’s silly to name a best country, but if someone had never travelled and they had the opportunity where would you advise them to go? My two favourite countries are Italy and India. I’m biased because I’ve been going to Italy for well over sixty years and always knew something of the language whereas I have many connections with India including two partly Indian granddaughters. But both are magnificently varied and rich cultures and landscapes. They are also very friendly places and, in a nice way, just a little mad. The first time I crossed into Italy with my parents it was on the Monte Cenisio pass – it is now a ski run with a tunnel underneath. The sole border guard – handsome if a trifle fat, as A.A. Milne described the king of France – sang to us in an excellent tenor voice before stamping our passports. Whereas in Rajasthan recently I had an interesting conversation with a Muslim in magnificent green robes who explained to me that Allah intended for us to seek enlightenment through alcohol.

(At the other end of the scale Israel and Russia are countries where I have never felt comfortable.)

BEST PROVINCES: Sicily and Northumberland. Both places feel very separate from the countries they are in and have strong dialects. Both are very complete landscapes with great mountains, coastlines, islands and towns. Both have excellent fish and fascinating antiquities and wonderful art sometimes where you least expect it. Sicily has better opera, Northumberland better castles.

THE LESSONS OF HOLIDAYMAKING

Of course, it all depends on what kind of holiday you want. The spectrum ranges from those who are happy to sit by a pool to those who would find prison more interesting. It will be evident that we are closer to the latter end of the spectrum. To borrow a phrase widely used in recreational sociology we are looking for “a narrative of risk and achievement” – something to do. For those of our persuasion the rules are:

1. General attitude: Amor Fati, to use the Latin version of the Stoic sound bite. Love your fate, embrace the idea that stuff happens. Perfect is boring and unmemorable. On motoring holidays I dread the car breaking down, but some of the most interesting encounters we ever had were because the car broke down. This was particularly true of our breakdowns in an African-American area in Louisiana and in Soviet-occupied Prague.

2. Don’t own a second home – it would only absorb time, money and other resources you might use to go to new places. For that matter try to avoid your close relatives going abroad unless they move pretty constantly, which can be a good thing.

3. Don’t take photographs. I finally gave up in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt in 2004. Why take the same pictures as everyone else? Who would ever look at them? And why take yourself? What are you trying to prove? Life is to be lived, not recorded.

4. Don’t go for too long. A three month holiday sounds great, but I’ve done it several times and diminishing returns set in.

5. Immerse yourself as far as possible. Learn something of the language and system of writing of where you are. Read only books about the place you’re in or by local authors. Eat only local food.

Lincoln Allison July 2024