Going is good and well but there’s no place like home

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Why do we invest so much money and energy in our houses – and then, at the drop of a hat, we lock them up so that we can go away on holidays to somewhere else? Even more so when that somewhere else has none of the comforts of home, and we spend hours, if not days, laden down with our worldly possessions so that we can have some of those home comforts when we get there?

Of course for those who owe the price of a small South American country on their homes, the whole point of a holiday is that they get away from the very thing that’s dragging them down for the other 50 weeks of the year.

And for most people, there is the desire for discovery, to see different places and experience how the other half lives.

But when you turn all of this on its head, there are millions of holidaymakers who have paid, well, millions to come to Galway on their holidays – and we’re here already.

It’s not as though we’re living in some sewer pit – but still the first thing we do when we get the chance is to pack our bags and vamoose.

You only have to look at the American or Japanese tourists stopping en mass to take photographs of our shop windows, to realise that we don’t appreciate what’s on our own doorstep.

And it’s when you stop too and look at the world through their eyes that you suddenly see the beauty that was there all along – the medieval streets, Galway Bay, Connemara, the Aran Islands…rugged natural beauty with a cosmopolitan soul at its core.

But this isn’t just an ode to Galway; no matter where we live, we always seem to think that our holidays would be better off spent somewhere else.

So families vacate a perfectly fine dwelling with heating, electricity, cooking facilities and feather beds to that they can squash into a canvass tent where they will sleep on half an inch of mat.

They will be no washing facilities but there may well be water – the kind that arrives as rain and flows freely through the supposedly waterproof cover over your head.

There will be no cooking facilities except a small burner that wouldn’t warm a gnat let alone cook sausages in the Irish summer.

Or there’s the caravan park where you marvel at the fact that the kids can’t fall out of their bed in their mobile home – because it’s wedged firmly between the walls on either side.

And who knew you could turn a dining table into a sleeping facility or that there was theoretically room for grown adults to in the space over the driver’s cab in a camper van?

Others will jet off to sunspots where they will roast like turkeys on Christmas morning, shoehorned into apartments where the definition of success is English-speaking CNN on the telly and balancing the need for air conditioning with the desire for something quieter than a cement mixer producing it.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.