WHEN we were at school we were heavily into waving each other off for the summer holidays. On the last day of term your arm would nearly come loose from its socket with the waving and the goodbyeing and the monumental separation anxiety until September.
And then at college it was the same you'd have to go in and out of the main hall a dozen times in case there were people you hadn't waved off to work in MacAlpines or to be counsellors at a summer camp in New Hampshire, and you'd be telling everyone whatever you were doing yourself so that you could hear the intake of breath and "aren't you lucky.
As a teacher it was the same... suppose we got holidays from school at 3.30 p.m., then I'd be back in a flash to Dalkey to spend the afternoon packing the case, and then catching the bus out to the airport to board the Starflight that night. But it was no good unless they all stood on the steps and waved me off. I'm a creature of ritual and I never feel the holiday has really started unless there's somebody to wave me off.
In London, Mr Gloom and his dog would watch us packing up the car and tell us about the traffic snarl ups and road works and contra flows, and about a holiday that he once went on where he got food poisoning, and another where he was awake all night because of foreigners. He would promise to keep an eye on the house but shaking his head, he would say it wasn't any good, we'd probably come back and find the door kicked in.
But Mr Gloom and his dog always waved us goodbye, which I liked. I can still see the big white paw of the fiercely muzzled animal making a lacklustre gesture in the air and his eyes saying that he would really know how to have a holiday were he ever given the chance.
Because I bike a sense of occasion I'm always very pleased if people say "Send a post card" it's sort of joining in the excitement of the whole thing. I always ask people to send me cards and I love the post during the summer, with nice shiny greetings from far or even near places. I even got a card last week from a non celebratory person who wrote "In my diary it says that I am to send you a post card, I'm afraid I have forgotten why." This is an utterly reliable but singularly joyless man who probably never waved anyone off on a holiday in his life.
BUT some people are marvellous. I know a woman who always gives her friends a big bar of nice soap when they're going on holidays you know the one that you think of buying and then decide not to because it's only soap and you fear you might be struck dead for spending that much money on it. I have thought of her happily on holidays for years as I unpack a soap in a plastic dish. Not just for the gift itself but for the sheer celebration of someone going on holiday.
You should go to the airport an hour early just to look at the faces of holiday makers and to see the dreams written all over them. Travel agencies don't just sell hotel rooms, air tickets and transfers they are selling some kind of magic. They sell you the notion of what will happen to you when you go to a place where the sun shines and the sea is blue, where the buildings are white and there will be romance with sun tanned people not available on wet bus journeys to work.
And the magic works at home, too. You see a picture of a cliff or a cove with gorgeous white foam on the blue green sea and you see yourself there having a picnic and not a care, and no one being able to phone you about anything because they don't know where you are, and going back to the hotel or guest house where the bed has been made for you and you can have a siesta without feeling you should be tidying the place up, and you can go off to the pub in the early evening without thinking you should be attacking your correspondence.
These are the dreams that take us off on a holiday and very often they come true. Much more often than you think, in fact. If you listened to those who were mugged in Majorca, robbed in Rimini, got diarrhoea in Corfu or were overcharged in Achill, you'd think that maybe everyone should stay at home. But the ones that enjoyed it don't go on so much about it, they just go back for more.
Like a woman who says she goes to this small place every summer, and it sounds so sleepy, you nearly drop off before she's finished telling you the name of it. But I know that it's far from that, she nearly has to be dried out when she comes back and there's almost always an unwise entanglement. When her friends wave her goodbye they always say they hope she will have a good rest and she hopes silently that she has a few good years in her still before she need remotely contemplate going on a holiday for a rest.
AND I know a man who has been on many cultural cruises where the visiting lecturers are world authorities on the classics and people think isn't it great that this guy is so into history and archaeology. Very few people know that he hardly ever disembarks from this ship and has barely seen Delphi. He has been having, for years, the most incredible relationship with an Englishwoman who travels without her husband. They just book this two week Mediterranean cruise and spend most of it in the cabin. It's like a wonderful souped up version of Brief Encounter, where nobody is noble but nobody is going to rock any kind of boat except the one they are cruising on.
During the rest of the year she is a dutiful wife in the Home Counties and he is an eligible bachelor, whom nobody ever questions about his holidays because we all feared that he might tell us more than we wanted to know about Ephesus.
And my two marvellous Swedish friends who came to bike around Ireland during a wet week with all their belongings on their back are going to come back for more. Even though they had to peddle down hills out in mountainy places because the wind was so strong against them.
And because I have thoroughly enjoyed the same things for a few summers I don't see any reason to change now.
And everything has been packed for a slow and happy journey around Ireland. I'm looking round for people to wave me goodbye, to wish us a safe journey, to beg us to send a post card, and best of all, to promise to be there listening eagerly to all the holiday tales when we get back.