Beautiful Nostalgia

People Have Always Been Busy

A cautionary tale from my childhood

When I was young, I used to go on holiday with my parents’ friends who lived across the road.

My father was always on business and my mother was ill. So every summer I went away for a week with Paul and Jill and their two children, Winnie and Peter.

It was a nightmare. To them, there was always something wrong: the hotel too hot or too cold, the rooms too dark or too light, the food too spicy or too bland, the drinks too strong or too weak, the weather too humid, the people too rude, too fat, too thin, too loud, too black!

Every holiday got worse, and every year I pleaded with my father not to send me away with the Beacons. Yep, that was their name: Paul, Jill, Winnie and Peter Beacon — what a family! Almost a complete nursery rhyme!

Unfortunately, when I begged my father to tell them I wasn’t going, he always claimed that they’d already booked me a room.

‘A room!’ I would cry out, ‘I never have my own room, I have to sleep with those two stupid kids — it’s like sleeping with two versions of the kid from The Omen.’

My father apologized, and promised that it would be the last time. Only for us to have the same conversation a year later.

I only stopped going when my mother died. By which time I was old enough to look after myself, so I simply refused to go, and that was that.

What I always found fascinating about the Beacons though, was that however shit their holiday was, the second they got back, they started planning another.

This is how the Beacons lived. Every waking second of their lives was planned. Programmed on a giant calendar in the kitchen using a complex system of coloured badges and stickers.

Just looking at their fridge made me feel queasy, as I never wrote anything down, and went by the motto that if I forgot something, it probably wasn’t important.

I once remarked to Jill Beacon that they should sell the calendar as a piece of modern art due to the colours. But the joke was lost on her. This wasn’t funny. This was Jill Beacon’s life. And if she lost her planner, her world would explode.

Thirty years later, the Beacons are still busy. Whenever I visit my now retired father, we still see them hurrying in and out of their house loaded with bags and boxes like two ants carrying supplies to a nest.

‘What exactly are they doing?’ I asked my father one time.

‘No idea,’ he sighed. ‘They never change. In fact I think they’ve got worse — if you can believe that.’

I couldn’t. ‘What do they have in those boxes, anyway, gold?’

My father laughed. ‘I don’t know. Sometimes I think they carry them in and out of their house to give them something to do. And if I looked inside them, they would be empty.’

‘Wow! Imagine that!’ I exclaimed. ‘A whole life spent rushing around pretending to be busy.’

My father looked across at me. ‘The funny thing is, they still go on holiday. And they still hate it.’

At that moment I wanted to scream and strangle my father to death and tell him how much I hated him and those holidays I was forced to go on while my mother was dying in hospital.

But it’s also at those times when you can forgive a person in an instant. Why this happens, I have no idea. Probably the same reason why Paul and Jill Beacon continue to go on holidays they hate.

So instead I laughed, got my father a beer, and ordered a curry. Then we watched the football and listened to the Beacons running in and out of their house with their arms full of empty boxes.

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