24. We aren't going on a summer holiday

So take some time off

I’ve recently switched jobs. And in working out when to finish my old job and start my new one, I decided to leave a two week gap. You know, take some time off.

Time off? At this time of year? In this part of the country? Localised entirely within my kitchen? Yes.

I know I'm talking about taking time off when occupational security is at an all-time low. Furloughs and redundancies are undeniably shitty, and I don't mean to suggest having a job you need time off from is somehow just as bad. I was unemployed for three months a couple of years ago, and it was terrible. But in the interest of being able to care about two things at once, I care both about people who need work and people who are working.

Those I know who’ve been lucky to stay employed during this storm don’t seem to be taking holidays, choosing to wait for more precedented times. It’s understandable. Nowhere to go, nothing to do. Save those days up for when the bars and airports are open, the beaches non-socially distanced, and strangers non-lethal.

So you can’t take a holiday. But I think you should take time off.

In North America we call them “vacations”. I struggled with holidays when I got to the UK, like I did with Autumn (“Fall”) and rubbish (“something untrue, garbage”). What I didn’t struggle with was getting 25 of them a year, on top of bank holidays.

(“Statutory holidays” in North America, which is exactly what you call something when you mean “I’d give you less time off, but it’s illegal”. Especially apt because 10 days is our criminal standard for vacation days.)

Both vacation and holiday imply an activity, specifically the activity of going somewhere else. This is so inherent to our understanding of the terms we had to invent the abominable “staycation” for when you take one but remain where you live.

Three questions you get asked when you take time off:

• “Going anywhere interesting?”

• “Have anything fun planned?”

• “I’m jealous.” (Not a question, and also super weird because everyone gets the same amount of holiday to take.)

I am such a holiday goer, to an absurdly proud degree. So absurdly that when I look at other visitors wherever I’ve flown, I think, “tourist”, and mean it in a bad way. Not me. Not me. I am a traveller. I research my location. I make maps. I go to where the locals go to drink and eat and then poop out the same things that locals do.

At the end of March I had a trip planned to Bologna. It would have been my first visit to Italy. And you bet your bottom-dollar that trip would have featured an offensive amount of “best ever” this and “hidden gem” that, along with nuclear-grade sneering at people taking photographs of each other and themselves. Yeah, that fountain looks so much better with you all standing with your hands up in front of it, you TOURISTS.

And then a global pandemic happened. Trip cancelled, holiday cancelled, days off cancelled.

I would have happily stuck with this non-holiday taking when something else happened. I got that new job. And the idea of going directly from one job to another job before more certain times could kick back in felt a bit off. Essentially I’d sign out of Slack and close my laptop, and three days later open a different laptop and sign into a different Slack.

So, despite living in a city where taking any unpaid time off is kind of a bad idea, I decided to take two weeks of unpaid time off. Two weeks when none of my honed holiday skills would be of any use whatsoever. Two weeks when not only wouldn’t I plan anything, but I couldn’t plan anything. Two weeks with nowhere to go, no one to see, nothing to do.

Glorious.

There is a difference between a holiday and taking time off, and right now, perhaps more than any other moment in recent memory, we need to be taking time off. I know that work offers both a distraction from the neverending hell of news updates, and a routine when individual days are hard to track and weeks blend together like so much maple butter syrup on hot pancakes. But work is still work, and our brains need downtime.

Downtime away from the news, away from Twitter, away from text threads and Houseparty and Zoom and maybe even breadmaking and mask sewing. Downtime with no other aspiration than to give our minds a freakin’ break.

And if you don’t know how to have a mind break without any of those things, maybe just the time to learn how to do that.

Downtime too from even things we generally enjoy, like the planning and executing of elaborate trips. I may read some books. I may learn Ableton Live. I may bake a cake. Or I may do none of those things.

Success, says the art critic Jerry Saltz, is time you spend doing what you want. For me, it’s simply been time when I’m free. Free from work, yes, but even free from my own ambitions, aspirations, and goals.

I wouldn’t want to live like that every day, and lord knows when this is “over” I’m going to want a holiday. But for now? Take some time off.