I was technically supposed be on holiday last weekend, but decided to opt against it and stay at home because of the dismal weather. Not that there is really such a thing as a holiday nowadays. Those ended once they bought us the technology to send emails to phones. At which point I started spending all my annual leave watching my workload slowly mount up on a tiny screen, until reaching an abrupt suffocating panic forcing me to spend the rest of their holiday one-finger poking at a tiny telephone key pad trying to resolve issues at home.
But who wouldn’t want to spend their holiday with the mighty hanging sword of Damocles, sitting in their pocket; the constant threat of having an afternoon ruined by an unprompted work-related call; never quite allowing you to relax properly and let yourself go? Thanks to technology the whole world is now merely an extension of my own office; bar the fact that it is seemingly more awkward, time-consuming and (thanks to roaming tariffs) rather costly to do work tasks from a remote area. So thanks for that technology. Thanks a lot.
In all honesty, I perhaps I am using the “mobile workplace” as a bit of a scapegoat. I can quite easily muster enough inner-turmoil from my own volition. Especially when going abroad. The cosmopolitan types (I’d essentially like to delude myself into being) aspire to travel as the great “mind-expander”. They’ll have inevitably gone back packing round Europe or Asia. I find this to be one of the things which sound both nice in theory, and often reviewed in fondness (where one can retrospectively bore family and friends with endless patronizing anecdotes about the Kibbutz from in front of the glowing safety of Holby City). But the bit in between seems like a living hell. Whenever I travel abroad, I prefer to go to the touristy places, preferably with an English-speaking bias. As a national representative, I am already carrying the stigma of strong lager, football violence, aggressively territorial promiscuity and - lest we forget - dubiously motivated warmongering. Frankly I do not need an inability to speak in a native tongue to compound my conveyance of ignorance. This is not to say that strong lager, football violence, promiscuity or warmongering are my particular forte. But I am never too far from my own personal ill-conceived prejudices. For instance, if the inability to read a language prevents me from being able to read a menu, I will almost certainly assume my meal will be along the lines of assorted freeze-dried budgies phallus, parboiled in a neo-communists’ tears. Or worse still – something with tofu in it. This summer I went to Krakov, and one of my eating companions ordered a ‘soup’ which basically consisted of a bowl of beetroot juice with a boiled egg floating in it. This is not what I’d call a soup. Having said that, whilst it might appear that I am having a cheap “tee-hee-at-foreigners-and-their-funny-ways”, had they added a handful of crisps and a pickled onion, my parents would have probably labeled it a salad back in the 80’s. So who the hell am I to judge?
One of the other places I took my ‘pocket office’ this year was Amsterdam. I have been there once before about a decade ago, but that was a stag do, so this time I wished to return for some of the City’s more cultural offerings. You can’t really suggest the Anne Frank museum to a stag do. Mass genocide really does tend to bring the party down. Even the most ardent stag party would shun than level of debauchery.
On paper, Amsterdam also seemed well-suited given my tourist self-consciousness, because I rather relished the opportunity to visit somewhere a little free and easier; with fewer oppressive formalities and customs to fret about. I won’t try and pretentiously pretend that the permissiveness of the city was not also a draw. I rather looked forward to the prospect of strolling round the Red Light District having a surreptitious peep at some of the windows. Although in practice, it was more a shamble past, eyes fixed on the floor, hoping to God that none of the women tried to make eye contact.
Similarly, I was consumed with childish glee at the prospect of reliving ‘days gone by’ and finding a coffee shop to indulge in some aromatic tobacco because I rather fancied the rare opportunity of being “blissed-out” for a change. At 32 years old, you could argue I was either looking to engage in a “when in Rome” cultural experience, or was simply having a premature mid-life crisis longing to recapture my youth. But once again, this would turn out to be something much better in theory than in practice because my companion and I just couldn’t find a coffee shop that looked comfortable enough. We peered through doorways into the poky smoke-holes. If they were busy they looked too lairy to enter. Perversely, the quieter once just seemed a bit seedy. I felt a bit like Goldilocks, but a child-censored crack-whore version Goldilocks concerned with the acquisition of drugs rather than porridge. But after endlessly traipsing round, we eventually steeled ourselves and bit the bullet, summoning the bravery to enter one of them, if only to rest our now weary legs. We made our seedy purchase, sat down, lit the end, and inhaled.
At this point you may expect me to start regaling you with crazy, psychedelic adventures on the streets of Amsterdam, or embark upon a series of enlightening thoughts that spun from my mind like spider’s webs, from a brain flew around so fast that whole new mental thought processes may be born within it through sentences that veer out of control, getting increasingly lost and hazy and head to no viable conclusion yet go on and on for far too long. That’s certainly what I thought anyway. Like a pretentious fop, I even rather laughably retrieved a notepad I had been carrying around to try and catch some of these passing flits. But after just three inhalations, the notebook started to make me feel a little vulnerable. And despite hiding it back in my pocket, self-conscious thoughts persisted, eventually giving way to plain old fear. The “when in Rome” argument of earlier had quickly been rejected, probably though the inescapable logic that I was in Amsterdam (thereby making the “Rome” argument completely redundant, by simple virtue of geography). But my mental state was now not equipped enough to face a midlife crisis, and this only made things worse.
Ten minutes later I was hidden away back in our hotel room. I use the term “hotel room” quite loosely, as it implies a sense of refuge. But it was actually more a cupboard with a bunk-bed and a sink chucked in. The walls were paper thin and the toilet was shared with the floor’s other inhabitants. As is symptomatically characteristic of aromatic tobacco, I lay in bed feeling enveloped by hunger. I could have easily headed out and found something to eat - after all, it was only about 8.30 in the evening for Christ’s sake. But in my altered state, the thought of going outside felt like a herculean task akin to Raiders of the Lost Ark. In fact even the thought of bumping into ANYONE AT ALL seemed like a terrifying prospect; which was quite frustrating, because this restricted me from going to the toilet which I quite needed. So the rest of the night was spent in my hovel, feeling resolutely paranoid, with the upper half of my stomach persistently rumbling, and the lower half feeling like it had Jeremy Clarkson squatting on it. Ah. Those precious holiday memories!
Consequently I have drawn the conclusion that trips away from the dull predictability of the office are not always necessarily the answer to relaxation and rejuvenation. What I could really do with is a holiday from my own stupid brain. If only technology could cater for that, like it did with the whole emails-to-phone thing, I’d be a very happy man indeed.
