It is mid-August and I am doing the thing I do every year and that I always say I’m not going to: take a fortnight off to “sort out my life” then end up spending the entire time taking two naps a day and binge-watching HBO.
If this were a staycation it would be fine, but it’s not. It’s neither restful (clearly demarcated time off), nor productive (aggressive engagement with my to-do list). Instead, it is the fortysomething version of summers off during college: a time spent drifting around waiting for something to happen.
Here are the things I went into this period determined to do: go through the felt tips in the box to determine which ones have dried up, and don’t work; figure out if the failure of the pressure valve on the Instant Pot is an important or trivial malfunction; start reading the personal finance pages (again); open the 17 letters on my desk from the tax authorities that I’m pretty sure will turn out to be spam; find out where to print photos these days; print photos; frame photos and put them on the wall; make a photo book to send to my mother’s relatives in South Africa who haven’t seen a photo of my kids in three years (and I’m really going to do it this time); look up what to do about chocolate stains; embrace more recipes containing sardines; figure out, once and for all, how I feel about couscous; and, obviously, go to the gym.
What I have done: watch seasons three and four (surprisingly good after a rocky second season!) of the dating-show satire UnREAL while eating ice-cream, and browsing property websites even though I’m not moving anywhere.
Being in America doesn’t help. Americans are notoriously terrible at taking proper holidays. Every friend I email in Britain has an out-of-office reply announcing they are away for two weeks, or often all of August. In New York the city empties at the weekends when people sit in traffic for five hours to go to the beach, before returning on Sunday night in similar traffic. This is supposed to be what summer is about: the fun interplay of weekends in traffic with low-productivity weekdays offering relief from the norm.
What it looks like in reality is a lot of guilty drifting and a slide into chaos. Showers have become a thing of the past. A single appointment in my diary becomes a source of oppression. Looking around my room, I see a week’s worth of socks on the floor and a wet towel from swimming last Friday lying in a mouldering heap in the corner, but I know I won’t do laundry today. Stupidly, I made an appointment to get my eyebrows done at 3pm and can’t possibly tidy up, or begin reading The Brothers Karamazov, with this huge commitment hanging over my head.
Perhaps I’m looking at it wrongly. Perhaps what I’m doing is the very definition of blissful inactivity. The idea that a vacation is a structural necessity risks folding it into the whole productivity drive, adding pressure to perform, as in every other part of one’s life. Slack and directionless, maybe I have discovered the true secret of downtime. God, I can’t wait for it to end.
• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
