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Holidays and How to Spend Them

The whole point of a holiday it that it should be a change. Most people like a change of scene; if they live up-country, they like to go to a big town and spend their time looking at shops and visiting cinemas and museums and art galleries, and having gay evenings at hotels and dances; if they are city-dwellers, they like a quiet holiday in the hills or by the sea, with nothing to do but walk and bathe and laze in the sun.

But such changes of scenes are usually expensive, and many people, from lack of money, are obliged to spend their holidays in the same surroundings as their working days. What can these do to make their period of rest a real holiday?

The best thing is to choose some form of occupation entirely different from their daily avocation. [...]

The whole virtue of holiday which brings a change of scene or occupation is that it is only temporary. Sooner or later it comes to an end, and the holiday-maker goes back to his normal life. If he has used his holiday well, he ought not to feel a very deep regret that it is over, however much he has enjoyed it, for it ought to have refreshed him and filled him with vigour for the true work of his life to which he is now returning.

(From Fifth Model Essays by Joyce Miller)

Why Not Stay at Home?

Some people travel on business, some in search of health. But it is neither the sickly nor the men of affairs who fill the Grand Hotels and the pockets of their proprietors. It is those who travel 'for pleasure’, as the phrase goes. What Epicurus, who never travelled except when he was banished, sought in his own garden, our tourists seek abroad. And do they find their happiness? Those who frequent the places where they resort must often find this question, with a tentative answer in the negative, fairly forced upon them. For tourists are in the main, a very gloomy-looking tribe. I have seen much brighter faces at a funeral than in the Piazza of St Mark's. Only when they can band together and pretend, for a brief, precarious hour, that they are at home, do the majority of tourists look really happy. One wonders why they come abroad. The fact is that few travellers really like travelling. If they go to the trouble and expense of travelling, it is not so much from curiosity, for fun, or because they like to see things beautiful and strange, as out of a kind of snobbery. People travel for the same reason as they collect works of art: because the best people do it. To have been to certain spots on the earth's surface is socially correct; and having been there, one is superior to those who have not. Moreover, travelling gives one something to talk about when one gets home. The subjects of conversation are not so numerous that one can neglect an opportunity of adding to one's store.

(From Along ili? Road by Aldous Huxley)