Year of the holiday

A friend and his wife designated this year "The Year of the Holiday".

They have had a really bad couple of years. Both have been seriously ill and separately and together have  been through the slow-burn anxiety of gruelling treatment.

Family events added to the difficulties, and things have been Tough. Yes, that's meant to be an upper-case T.

So the Year of the Holiday was part recuperation, part triumphant recovery, a sort of shaking a defiant fist at the Fates.

At the weekend we chatted on the phone. He was about to depart for holiday Number 4. (It could be Number 5 and it is only April.)

"It's exhausting, this Year of the Holiday," he said. "It's impossible being away all the time. We are never here. It's giving us headaches. There's no time to get out on the bike. There's no time to do anything."

At work, he was always Mr Drive. He is an achiever, and likes no moment to be unproductive. Now retired (whatever that means), he likes to makes sure his every day is an advance, and he even has targets for leisure activities. 

He is usually purposefully blissed out on baking bread (an expert loafer in one sense at least), cycling, walking, growing things on his allotment and generally revelling in domesticity. 

He has done the tough stuff. I am just hoping he will survive the well-intentioned riot of absence which is proving so much more taxing.