Feature
No sense of adventure
Trust me, I’ve been there Zoe Williams
DON’T get me wrong, it’s
absolutely none of my
business where you go on holiday. I support
you in all your choices, and even if I didn’t, I
wouldn’t say anything. But I just quickly need
to point out what a phenomenal waste of time,
energy, your own resources and the Earth’s
those action-adventure holidays are.
You know the kind of thing. Maybe you get on a Ski-doo, or a horse, or you jog through sand, or you climb ice. Perhaps you plan to yoke buffalo and then, once you have them at close quarters, learn a valuable lesson from them about sharing. Can I just ask – and this non-judgemental question comes from a place of love – what on earth is the matter with you?
Probably 90% of any action-adventure package just involves being shouted at by an Australian. You don’t need to go to Nicaragua for this, you can just go down to your local park and walk in front of a Frisbee. You will almost certainly dislocate or break something. There’s an umbrella term for this, “weekend warrior injury”, which covers everything liable to befall somebody who does nothing all week and then darts about like a hare all weekend.
Imagine how much worse these injuries
are when you’ve done nothing for a year and
suddenly you expect your body to scale the face
of a cliff. You will probably break a collar bone or
a leg. I tell you, it’s gutting just from a feminist
point of view, to have seen the movement fight
decades for decent maternity leave, only to find
abseiling idiots getting six months off, and then
some, just for slipping down a crevasse. Gutting.
Plus, if you remember the lesson of Working Girl (am I dating myself here? That’s as in “carbon dating”, not actually going out with myself), some hot youngster will be after your job and shagging your boyfriend in no time.
In the unlikely event that you come back in one piece, you will have spent a fortnight pushing yourself to Olympian levels of fitness – I’m thinking specifically about the sand-jogging, but I’m sure the same is true of ice-sports – only to come home and resume your regular life of sitting, strolling, drinking and eating. Doesn’t the flurry of physicality just make modern life seem even more futile than it did before? That, my friend, is not the point of a holiday. The point of a holiday is to make modern life seem better than it did before, owing to the fact that you have just spent two weeks on a beach and got way too hot. I’m out of space, and I haven’t even begun. Just don’t do it. If you think you want to do it, take some time out to think about it. Reconsider, near a pool. Hopefully you’ll have blown your year’s leave before doing anything hasty.
