There's this good tempered man, called John, whose boss insulted him deeply at the end of May. His boss said, quite casually and without malice, that poor old John was way beyond being computer literate and though not exactly a dinosaur in the quill-pen league, couldn't be expected to know a spreadsheet from a search engine.
John has August off and he has plans. He is a 51-year-old married man with two children. Normally they take a house by the seaside, but the children were getting bored with it, so this year they are not packing the buckets and spades. His wife is going to take in three foreign students for the month. His sons, mollified by the fact that these are going to be drop-dead gorgeous Mediterranean girls, are going to hang around and help them integrate.
John is going to do an intensive, four-week computer course. It will cost exactly the same as renting the holiday-home. John will eat less, drink less, spend far less than if he were in a resort. Ahead of him lies that glorious day in the first week in September when he will be so much on top of things that the man who called him Poor Old John will wilt in his soft Gucci shoes and be henceforth riddled with great self-doubt about his powers of judgment. It's a vision that will sustain John throughout concentrated hours of taskbars, title bars and toolbars instead of the kind of bars he was normally used to in August.
It will be the most satisfying summer ever.
Maria is 26 and this summer she is going to spend her summer holiday finding a husband. She knows how it's done. You just turn up looking well where there are loads of fellows. Not in a pub when they're all drunk. Not in a disco or a club when it would be dead easy to get a fellow for the night but not at all easy to get a husband. It has to be planned scientifically.
You don't want to waste time on tourists, visitors, handsome fellows passing through looking for one-night-stands. You go where there will be a glut of marriageable men. She has studied lists of conferences, golf classics, race meetings, yachting events. She knows where they will be, and she will be there. With a cover story.
She is here on a short vacation with her mother and she has come to the hotel. Mother will be distracted elsewhere with friends but will be constantly expected on the scene. This way Maria doesn't look like she's there to pick people up. She won't be taken for a Working Girl cruising the provincial hotels sending out wrong, if exciting, signals to professional men in their late thirties. Her quarry.
Her mother will turn up full of apologies later in the evening when friendships have been made but before they can be expected to be cemented in bed or anything.
But could this possibly work and why would her mother go along with it? Maria shrugs. How else do you think her mother ever found Maria's father all those years ago? And it was much harder back in the 1960s than it is nowadays.
Ronnie, who is 12, got third prize in a local photography competition. The prize was a book token for £10. But more important, he got a certificate, and he has had this certificate laminated and wears it around his neck, on a cord.
He lives near a well-known beauty spot, in an area very much visited by tourists. Ronnie noticed that people coming to see the sights always wanted their whole family to be included in the shot. They would offer strangers their camera with detailed and complicated instructions of what to press.
How much better to have a semi-professional like himself involved. He stands nearby, hovering slightly, ready for the opportunity.
"I'm in the business of photography myself," he will say to a group as if they had actually asked a 12-year-old boy his line of work. He will indicate his certificate hanging around his neck like a press pass, as proof of his great skills.
People usually nod gravely at this, there's not much else they can do.
"So if you'd like me to include you all in a snap I know the best place for you to stand, and I charge £1 a session."
He will produce for inspection a pound coin of his own in case any of them might be confused about the currency. They normally inquire about the nature and extent of a session. Ronnie says airily that it would include up to half a dozen shots with any of the cameras of the group in question. Much more often than not, they agree. They admire his enterprise, his sheer gall.
And it is a help to have someone who doesn't keep bleating about what should they look through and what should they press.
He has been watched beadily since mid-June by a woman who runs a nearby craft shop. She still can't make up her mind about Ronnie. He's certainly putting in the hours and making the most of his summer. It's just that with no overheads at all, he can take in £50 on a good day. That's rather a lot for a 12-year-old, she thinks. In fact, it's astronomical.
But she has no proof that he'll spend it foolishly or that earning this fortune in a wet summer will somehow lead him into organised crime, so she still can't blow the whistle on him.
AND what about myself, off on sort-of holidays until the start of September - what will I do? I know what I think I'll do, of course . . . walk my legs off, read the 36 books listed in a spiral-bound notebook, master the Internet, deal with all the letters in the In basket, learn to cook with yeast, visit at last six parts of Ireland I've never been to, identify and plant a yellow flower that has been driving me mad in other peoples' gardens for years, write postcards of praise to people I admire, teach the cats some kind of trick, any trick, so that people will think they are brighter than they are, label the videos, learn to park in something smaller than a football pitch.
But then maybe I won't do any of those things.
The whole essence of anyone's summer holiday is that it is always based on some kind of a dream.
Maeve Binchy's column will resume on Saturday, September 5th