How not to get away from it all

It’s vacation season in the Northern Hemisphere: an opportunity – which always slips a few pounds of survivor guilt into your baggage – to exfiltrate from this traumatised world for a week or two.

As far as time and money allow, and within whatever environmental limits we set for ourselves, we go in search of a place like Kokomo – that mythical holiday destination from the Beach Boys song. Kokomo, according to the perfect lyrics, is a place you wanna go to get away from it all. A place where the dreamy look in your partner’s eye will give you – to use the precise diagnostic term – a tropical contact high.

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Like Atlantis, the existence of Kokomo has never been established, but that doesn’t stop a billion of us setting out every summer in hope. I can’t claim to have found Kokomo myself, but I can offer you new information that keeps the hope alive. Recall, if you will, that every particle has an antiparticle, and every rose its thorn. The universe keeps balance, so if we find a place exactly unlike Kokomo – Antikomo, if you like – then the existence of Kokomo itself is as good as proven.

In this exhilarating context I can report that my family has indeed found a place, in southern France, that is extremely unlike Kokomo. And last week, we attempted to go on holiday there.

In Japanese there’s probably an exact word for the emotion of arriving in an Airbnb that looked good in airbrushed photos but which, on arrival, turns out to be an eerie and rat-infested dwelling with drawers full of unwashed cutlery, a creepy smell of decay, and poignant photos of the owner’s kids wearing weirdly ambiguous expressions. Somewhere in this disintegration was someone’s failed hope of recovery.

The Japanese are the great cartographers of human emotion, and they long ago mapped all the moods we accidentally wash up in. I expect their word also captures my heartbreak at the desperation of the Airbnb host who hoped this mournful abode would do. Overall it was an unsettling feeling: in equal parts indignation, self-examination, and a solidary sense that the refund was going to leave both us and the host holding sorrow.

Whatever the word is for the feeling, I was feeling it a few nights ago at one am, standing in the kitchen of a place I never wanna go again. My personal Antikomo turns out to be a small, forsaken, mid-priced Airbnb deep in the forests of the Verdon. A place where we were meanna go for ten days, but which we left after ten sleepless hours. It’s hard to describe the urgent sense that something was deeply wrong, with that house and the whole sinister hillside on which it squatted. It tingled the back of your neck and buzzed the hairs on your arms. There are places in this world where the living are not welcome, let’s leave it at that.

The setting created between the members of our family not a tropical contact high, but a temperate contact downer. It sparked some nuanced family conversations we’d never have had in paradise – illuminating, difficult, and oddly freeing. We were experiencing the melancholia of arriving at a house that bears the stains of a life crumbling under madness or misfortune. In the sudden, unexpected overlap of your getting-away-from-it-all with a fellow human being’s all, your heart opens up.

And that’s the point of tourism, of course: you go to new places to feel new things. No one promised they’d always be simple things to feel. Having said that, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend you make a beeline for our particular Antikomo. If that place had a tourist shop with a rotating rack of those split-screen holiday postcards, they’d be reproductions of Francis Bacon paintings juxtaposed with notable local landmarks such as the bathtub matted with pubic hair, and the door with the big dried blood stain.

Outside, through the filthy windows, a sickle moon was rising. By its glow – because the kitchen lights weren’t working – I was examining those photos of the owner’s kids. If you ever want to decode a cryptic facial expression, you just need to imagine various picture captions until one sticks. Maël and Hugo were described by classmates as popular children who gave no sign of the troubling situation at home.

Foxes screamed in the shadows. Branches tapped on the panes. A hornet flew out of nowhere, stung me hard on the back of the head, and buzzed back into some recess to wait. When my own family was settled for the night – I say settled, but really it was the sort of place where you sleep on the bed, not in it – I tried to make tea to cheer myself up. I was staying awake to keep vigil, in case actual blood started dripping from the taps and I had to rouse the family to flee.

Tea was also a failure, sadly. The only mug in the cupboard was a faded and dirty thing that congratulated some absent recipient on two years of service at Yahoo! One day all the tech bros’ brands will be faded vessels in a haunted holiday rental. But in the meantime, I was the mug. The kettle was greasy to the touch, and in the end I didn’t have the heart to discover what was going to come out of the taps.

Every complex feeling is a gift, an invitation to reflect. How did we get here? This is what we must ask ourselves, as philosophers. And – as I’m sure Kierkegaard would have answered – we got here down the A6, the Autoroute of the Sun, France’s great holiday artery. After a joyous and beautiful family wedding at my mother-in-law’s village, which I told you about last time, we’d joined the hopeful flow of a hundred thousand fellow vacationers driving south in search of Kokomo.

I secretly love holiday drives. The Latin vacationem holds the idea of an earned exemption from duty – a freedom from our workaday lives. And for a psychologist, there is no greater happiness than to diagnose fellow motorists based on the style in which they seek that freedom.

At one extreme there is the solo motorcyclist, who laughs at death and packs light for life. One overtook us just south of Lyon, at 100 mph, with one hand on the handlebars, wearing a Kaiser Wilhelm helmet and yellow heart-shaped sunglasses. That fellow was on vacation from the second he turned the ignition. Wherever he spread the slim bedroll currently strapped to the back of his Harley, that town was going to be reviewing him on TripAdvisor.

And then, on the other end of the personality scale, I give you the grim-faced family we passed in their forty-foot motorhome with extendable hydraulic pods, towing a large family car with four canoes and four bikes strapped to it tightly. They clearly weren’t having fun yet. But when they arrived, if fun didn’t turn out to be somewhere in their five thousand cubic feet of packing, at least they could unhitch the car and pop back for it.

French is a language of extremely precise psychological observation, and it has a perfect word – dépaysement – that describes the disorientation and unhomeliness of being in a new place. The word comes from your pays – your land – and the feeling of being emotionally uprooted from its familiar routines, which serve to numb you to your own existence. Dépaysement is the feeling of noticing yourself.

What we pack with us on holiday is the minimum stuff we think we’ll need to survive a week or two of dépaysement. That biker only needed a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses. My wife just needs the music of Parisian chanteuse Barbara, plus the full set of her own kitchen knives, which she sharpens to a terrifying readiness and carries everywhere in an oilcloth. So long as she has those two things, there is no hardship that can’t be improved with some tomato-dicing or a singalong.

Others are more maximalist packers, who need a car and four canoes, four bikes and a forty-foot RV packed with spacesuits and two weeks’ breathable air. That family is probably still down south as I write: four solemn visitors on a hostile planet, exploring the old town of Toulon in a series of tightly-scheduled EVAs.

Look: I’m the last person who could judge them. I’m the genius who accidentally booked his family into a horror film instead of a holiday. And in any case, we all meet the world with whatever baggage our lives have given us to carry. We do our best. And perhaps the carefree biker, when he reached his destination, acted like an asshole there, while maybe the motorhome family emerged from their capsule to engage in cautious acts of kindness. We never know how other people got here. We never know what each of us is carrying.

Whether you can get away this year or not, and whatever you pack to survive your own dépaysement – whether you take your kitchen knives or your entire mothership – I wish you a holiday season of self-discovery. A holiday is more than a respite, however vital respite is on its own. A vacation is also an annual reinhabiting of our selves. In any meaningful trip, the destination is you.

So, whether you find the mythical paradise of Kokomo, or whether – like us – you find its opposite, I wish you enough time to feel the feelings that new places give you. We need our feelings now. We need them so we can know who we are. Soon the vacation will be over and we must return to the world, with its hunger and its war, and its dehumanising algorithms whipping up ignorance and hate. The autumn gales will bring a cold rain, and we will need our whole humanity in order to withstand it.

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Thank you for reading Human Again, a small dose of therapy in your in-box every week. I love comments & feedback, so please don’t hold back. What are your personal Kokomo and Antikomo? What did you learn about yourself there?

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