Post-holiday punishment

It is a fact universally acknowledged that when you go on holiday and enjoy yourself the world has to punish you, something to do with re-balancing your life enjoyment quota I think. This comes in many forms. One of the most common manifestations this punishment takes is the ‘email mountain’. Fearsome, and often numbering in the thousands, the email mountain is not easy to subdue. Because I have several jobs I have several email mountains but because I work from home I can tackle the email mountain in my pjs and eating a jammy dodger. Ha! Take that world!

The next fearsome mountain is the ‘diary mountain’. Before holidays life does not exist post holiday so it is natural to agree to all kinds of things without checking ones diary. The diary barely exists in the run up to a holiday, so much so that I didn’t even plan my return journey from the airport, it just didn’t exist until the day I was due to fly back (sob). The diary mountain really bites when realise that you not only have to go back to work (how unreasonable) but you have also booked yourself up from now until kingdom come with things you would never normally agree to but cheerfully signed up to in your blissed out pre-holiday state. Meetings feature highly. It’s all very painful. And of course you are also contending with the ‘clothes washing mountain’, don’t we all know that one well…..

The third mountain I have encountered, and perhaps the most terrible of all as it was unexpected, was the ‘cardboard mountain’. Most normal humans are unlikely to encounter this one. You may meet it in the guise of the ‘rubbish mountain’ – i.e. the bin man can’t walk two feet to collect your bin while you’re away so you are inundated with black sacks for a week – mine was at the shop where, in true holiday punishment style, no one took out the cardboard recycling for two weeks. Think death by cardboard boxes.

But alas, I fight boldly on and have given the universe a big ol’ signal as to my future holidaying intentions by booking a Christmas trip to Rome. I should think I’ll have emerged from the cardboard mountain by then….