Words of a song…but just the thought of a holiday is fun. When it rains, schools get rain holidays. As for people dying, surely the holiday may be to honour him but do you really think people actually mourn at home?
Weekends are holidays; the trouble starts because all week long you pine for the weekend. Holidays are only fun because there are other days in between when you work hard, you work long, you may not work smart but you work!
Think of the British who came and ruled us — they pined to go back “home” to England BUT especially before the days of fast jetting around that was out of the question. Every few years maybe one could go back or else people would have journeyed and holidayed more than they were able to work!
So instead they made chota Englands whereever they could: and how ingeniously they did it. First was the climate, it had to be cool for God’s sake to resemble ‘home’ and then it had to have hills and vales and when they could not find any such place they actually created them . And at what cost, to themselves and everyone else! You have to hand it over to them, creating small English village type of homes, calling them ever so Englishy names like Dingle Dell and Gables, and what have you! The roads or lanes were called after the biggest house on the road like Havelock Lane and Havelock House.
The staff who had never even learnt to read or write made English soups and Yorkshire puddings and were horrified to make a rasam as they knew only Mulligatawny soup which literally means Pepper water. I wonder if they would have been as enamoured if the skins of the masters and mistresses and the little babas were NOT white? Just a thought.
But the end result is that we have these little old English Hill Stations dotted around the country side where we can all feel we have gone abroad or something: The trick is not to nip in and out but stay for a reasonable amount of time and get acclimatized, get into a way of life as it were. When people ask, “What? going away for weeks, what will you do there?” you answer the same thing you do back at home in your own corner of the hot plains.
First you have got away from the hot weather, you can breathe easier, you can play golf or tennis or what ever you do, except swim, I suppose. I mean nobody ever asks you, “Good Lord you stay in the same place for years? What do you do?” Reminds me of a thrice married young lady who was in the midst of much married couple who was celebrating its 40th anniversary or so; not to be put out, she asked, “Aren’t you people bored with each other?”
