Too many troubles to pack in my suitcase

KATE HOLMQUISThas a bad case of pre-holiday anxiety

I HAVE A recurring nightmare about holidays. It’s 4 am and I’ve been awake all night because I can’t pack the suitcases fast enough, and I’m leaving things behind, and I get lost on the way to the airport, and in the airport I get lost again.

I’ve forgotten my passport and the children’s passports and have to get a taxi home to find them. When I get back to the airport I have to wait in line, and throw away the potentially terrorist make-up and suncream and mineral water that I should have put into plastic bags, which I now have to pay €1 for in a vending machine. (Actually, the authorities take the mineral water so that the airport can charge me double for it on the other side of customs.) My flight doesn’t land where it’s supposed to, and I’m in a strange country where nobody cares, and the airline I’m flying with has no representatives here.

I’m packing, packing, packing in this nightmare. I have nothing to wear. My contact lenses have gone missing. I can’t speak the language. The camera and the mobile phone are out of batteries and I can’t find the electric adaptor for whatever appliance I have in whatever country I’m supposed to be in.

My nightmare is just a shade this side of reality. If any of you Freudians, Jungians, Reiki healers and crystal gazers want to give me your interpretation, I’m available. My own interpretation is that travelling is stressful enough to give you nightmares.

The swimsuit issue is another aspect of pre-holiday stress. I hate the idea of people seeing me in my fragrant, flagrant, middle-aged glory on the beach. Fortunately, there’s a place across the street from the Irish Times office – Intimate Lingerie (which we thought was a shop of ill repute) – where Pauline prods me into something that makes me feel not too embarrassed. Pauline has a way of convincing me that the tummy- condensing boob-reducing halter-top one-piece is slimming and classy, which it is. If only she could pack the unpackable suitcase that I keep dreaming about.

I’m heading to Massachusetts soon to see my original family, as they say in the US, and I have got the passports organised. They were really nice at the US Embassy but they wouldn’t give my kids new passports without my husband’s presence and written permission. The Hague Convention is a good thing, and I accept that I should not be allowed to abduct my children, but I do sometimes feel that Homeland Security is making me feel insecure. My husband and children, inspired by sitting on what is officially US soil in the waiting area, want to go to the US to live, so homesick are they for the States. Maybe we shouldn’t come home to Ireland after all.

Another pre-holiday worry keeping me awake: by telling you that I’m going on holiday, I could end up like Marian Finucane a few years back and have my house burgled. Just to let you know, there will be someone living in the house and I have four dogs who will lick you to death if the tarantula doesn’t get you first. Plus, we’ve been burgled twice and there’s nothing left to take.

I will be writing my column from Chatham, on Cape Cod. A busman’s holiday, though apparently I’m in the majority – most people log on, keep in touch and deliver when they’re out of the office. This sociological phenomenon is called “holiday guilt”. Hotel.com did a survey of more than 2,000 people and found that 67 per cent of the Irish work on holiday, second only to the French (68 per cent). How mad is that? Forty per cent of us are “emergency browsers”, 50 per cent check in every second day, and 27 per cent are logging on once a day or more.

The really disturbing truth is that people on holiday are hiding their office addiction from their partners and children. Hotels.com has even recommended that families travelling together agree a “Blackberry hour” on the beach or by the pool to avoid marital strife.

No wonder I’m having nightmares. And I haven’t even got a Blackberry. I’d better get one soon. How am I going to file my column? But what if I leave the Blackberry in the tray at airport security and lose it forever? The Eldredge library in Chatham, which has that intoxicating smell of real books and is where I fell in love with Jane Austen as a 12-year-old, has a Wifi zone, but what if I can’t make my laptop work? I’ll have to join the queue of work addicts who sign up at the desk with the sweet elderly volunteers before sending their missives back to the office.

That’s another thing to worry about. Plus, I accidentally put my driver’s licence through the wash and have to get a new one, so that I can pick up the rental car. Sometimes I think it would be much easier to just head down to Dingle, but then I’d have to pack the car and we wouldn’t all fit and the car might breakdown. Do I sound pre-holiday stressed?

Kate Holmquist’s column appears on Fridays until the end of August.