A couple of weeks ago Times of Malta reported the results of an NSO survey on income and living conditions. It seems that 60 per cent of Maltese households with children cannot afford a single holiday a year. The actual wording used in the survey question was ‘a week’s annual holiday away from home’.

My heart bleeds. First, if the overbooked flights and the daily bedlam on the Gozo ferry are anything to go by, I find the figure a tad hard to digest. Second – and I really need St Rita’s intercession as patron of impossible causes on this one – I would argue that holidays are quite unnecessary.

The NSO question wording is clear. It takes ‘holiday’ to mean displacement from home for a definite length of time. Which is as sound as can be really, because that’s what the word has come to mean, culturally speaking.

The things that vary are the extent and the duration of displacement. They are commonly believed to be directly related to the depth of one’s pocket. People on a lean income are expected to make do with a few days in Gozo, lottery winners with several weeks on a Caribbean cruise. The principle, however, is the same, and it is also the target of my quibble.

First, displacement (travel, in decent English). Madly enough, it was anthropology that first got me thinking. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques is one of the most famous books in the business. It opens with the words: “Travel and travellers are two things I loathe”.

Certainly his opinion was shared by people like Marilyn Strathern. I remember her at the height of her stellar career telling an audience of wanderlust-struck doctoral students that travel doesn’t necessarily, and in fact usually doesn’t, broaden the mind.

I know people who have been around the world a dozen times and who will swear that homeopathy is good for you, that Renzo Piano is a philistine who single-handedly destroyed Valletta, and that ‘the East’ is the source of all spirituality.

The opposite pole is well documented. Take one Immanuel Kant, who spent his entire life holed up in Königsberg in what was then Prussia. Narrow-minded? Not exactly. His ideas changed the intellectual landscape of Europe and are still highly influential today, more than 200 years after his death (in Königsberg).

Happily for my argument, one of his key contributions was in the field of cosmopolitanism and the possibility of perpetual world peace.

So no, and even if one lives on a small island, travel is not a requisite of a well-rounded life. Still, that hardly settles the matter. Broadened minds or not, what if it is just a bit of fun that adds that extra something to a holiday?

I will not deny that travel can on occasion be fun. (Never mind that that fun may include physical molestation by strangers in uniform at airport check-ins, missed trains, and a week’s wages spent on the naffest rubbish.) My point is simply that holidays can survive perfectly well without it.

The portmanteau in question is ‘staycation’. It appears to be a relatively recent coinage and linked especially to the ongoing global recession. Only it doesn’t need to be. To use myself as an example, both my parents had relatively decent salaries and not a whiff of economic meltdown. And yet I remember a time in my childhood when their combined income was not such that we could afford to travel as a family. I suppose they had other priorities in mind, things like private schooling and such frivolities.

I will not deny that travel can on occasion be fun

So, no holidays for poor Little-Prince-On-Board Mark then? On the contrary, I remember looking forward tremendously to summer and Christmas breaks, to day trips to the sea, and to afternoons spent chasing butterflies at Wardija. I especially remember the daily morning swims in Valletta and the afternoons spent reading books borrowed at the British Cultural Institute library.

Which brings me to my second point, that on duration. I find it extremely stupid and counter-productive to think of a holiday as a fixed quantity. I know people who work all day 337 days a year and earn stacks of cash in the process. “Ah”, they will say, “but that means we can then afford to spend four weeks every year in five-star luxury in the Seychelles, or St Moritz. Unlike you”.

Locations aside, I care not a jot for this notion of holiday. My highly sophisticated argument is that a year consists of 52, not four, weeks. I like to think of a holiday as a process rather than an event. Ideally a daily process at that.

The problem with tourist brochures and popular wisdom is that they consistently underestimate the restorative and therapeutic value of rhythm and daily routine in familiar surroundings. Maybe it’s just me, but I derive infinitely more pleasure in spreading my holidays thin than to cram them into two weeks of sore feet and goggle-eyed sightseeing. (The foot massage at the St Moritz spa doesn’t count, it can be had in Malta.)

Picture it: ‘NSO survey shows that 60 per cent of the population cannot afford to go to the beach, to enjoy summer fruit and siestas, and to take daily walks’. That to me would be a properly sorry read.

mafalzon@hotmail.com