AGAINST SKIING HOLIDAYS
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a normal person in search of a holiday will enjoy skiing; they will delight in bracing mountain air, thrill at going down mogul dotted slopes and feel pleasantly exhausted after a day of parallel turns. This assumption about pleasure joins a host of others proposed by the modern world. Normal people will equally enjoy white wine, the Amalfi coast, the novels of Margaret Atwood, dogs, high heels, small children, Miami beach, oral sex, Banksy, marriage, Netflix and vegetarianism. We may legitimately delight in all of these elements; the issue lies in the immense pressure we are under to do so. The truth about ourselves may, in reality, be a great deal more mysterious than the official narrative allows. Whatever our commitments to decorum and good order, we may in our depths be far more distinctive than we’re supposed to be. We may — once we become sensitive to our faint tremors of authentic delight and boredom — hate the idea of jogging, the theatre, business school, jazz, tattoos, flossing or meeting other people’s dogs. We might find Paris and New York unbearable, while conversely getting a kick out of staying home and reading the novels of Stendhal, baking apricot cakes and chatting to the over 80s. Our pleasures may be situated in some profoundly unheralded and unfashionable corners. We tend to be so shy about who we actually are. We repress our nascent wish to go plane spotting. We don’t admit to many people that we’d like to be in bed by nine. Or are interested in visiting nuclear power stations. Or might want to take a holiday in Turkmenistan or Gabon. We are, each one us, fetishists of varied kinds, but fetishists without the confidence to acknowledge the singular nature of their delights. If we realise we are at odds with our peers, if we secretly start to despise what they adore, if we turn down Kitzbuhel, we aren’t merely being capricious; we’re growing into ourselves. Acquiring a reputation as a weirdo is no cause for alarm; it’s a sign that we are — at last — developing a character.
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