Summer is here and people are thinking about holidays and vacations. We all imagine the perfect vacation but can we ever achieve it?
I was reading a good book recently called "The Art of Travel", by Alain de Botton, and he had some interesting things to say about the perfect vacation, and why perhaps it will always be unattainable:

"I remember a trip to a Caribbean island a few years ago. I looked forward to it for months, picturing the beautiful hotel on the shores of a sandy beach (as promised in a glossy brochure called Winter Sun). But on my first morning on the island, I realised something at once obvious and surprising: I had brought my body with me and, because of a fateful arrangement in the human constitution, my interaction with the island was critically dependent on its co-operation. The body proved a temperamental partner. Asked to sit in a deckchair so that the mind could savour the beach, the trees and the sun, it collapsed into difficulties; the ears complained of an enervating wind, the skin of stickiness and the toes of the sand lodged uncomfortably between them. After 10 minutes, the entire machine threatened to faint. Unfortunately, I had brought along something else that risked clouding my appreciation of my surroundings: my mind in its entirety -- not only the aesthetic lobe (which had planned the journey and agreed to pay for it), but also the part committed to anxiety, boredom, melancholy, self-disgust and financial alarm."

Well, there you go... or perhaps you don't. Perhaps you stay home annd read, or better still write, a book.