Briefly Back In Blighty

Long holidays are one of the advantages of working in a university. As a lowly English teacher, I don't get the kind of holidays enjoyed by my tenured colleagues, which are so long that occasionally professors forget which university they were teaching in and turn up bemusedly at Oxford instead of Cambridge at the start of the Michaelmas term. Nevertheless, a six-week holiday is not bad; indeed it is the kind of holiday many people would accept a substantial pay cut for. Come to think of it, by electing to work in academia, that is pretty much what you are doing. However, I have only started to feel that I am really on holiday this week. As I said to Nalan, the word "holiday" is associated with two things: being somewhere else and relaxing, and most of the time I only achieved the former. My whistle-stop tour of Bodrum, Kos and Rhodes was certainly fun but not particularly relaxing, and introducing my parents-in-law to Britain was interesting and rewarding but only slightly less stressful than playing buzkashi with a bunch of Afghan tribesmen.



But now the Turkish half of the family have gone home, leaving me with all the creams and shampoos they couldn't get through airport security, and I am finally experiencing the relaxing side of holidaying. When no one is giving you stress, the oddest things can be relaxing - shopping at Sainsbury's, for example. Up and down the aisles we go, marveling at the twenty varieties of couscous and the Malaysian chardonnay. This compares favourably with my shopping experiences of the previous week, most of which involved shoes, and endless conversations about how hard it is to find comfortable shoes.

By the way, I may be up in Leeds on Saturday, if anyone can put me up for the night.