GIVE ME A SUMMER BREAK:Looking for an idyllic escape? Then head for your back garden rather than the Costa del Sol, writes KATE HOLMQUIST

A FRIEND recently came home from a three-week holiday in the Med with a deep tan and a renewed pleasure in wine and the odd cigarette. He is having re-entry difficulties that have nothing to do with Customs. He wants to be back in that place, where he didn’t have to e-mail or text or answer to deadlines, where he had time to listen to his wife, play with his kids and enjoy his food. He looks like a new man, but, as much as he loves his job, he and I both know, in that silent way that’s beyond conversation, that his rejuvenation won’t last longer than his tan.

He’s already back in the world of stress and ambition and is hoping that his holiday has bolstered him against the stress for a little bit longer. But a holiday isn’t a vaccine against the virus of the stress we live with every day. Holidays are not real. They are a magical place – a safety-valve experience. Eventually we have to return to the rain and the restrictions.

And when he tells me about his holiday, it’s in a few, short words. He’s almost apologising. His tan is almost something to feel shameful about. This summer, there’s not nearly as much summer tan around. Being pale and Irish has become a badge of honour. The new trend is to try to find a sense of escape at home.

This has more of us asking, what is a beautiful day? Can I find it in my back garden? We’re always looking for that beautiful day. And even when we’ve paid to go somewhere foreign, exotic or down the country, we still haven’t found what we’re looking for. (Forgive the U2 references, but Bono’s lyrics have a way of working their way into my head.)

Our daily lives are so dull and routine that we think a couple of weeks somewhere else will give us the freedom to be who we really are, want to be and deserve to be. Sunshine on the skin, then the coolness of the water in the sea; the food tasting better because we’re eating outdoors; the novelty of a new place where local customs and curiosities are cast in relief.

If our lives were the way they should be and we were happy with our “lifestyle” – that nasty 1990s word – we wouldn’t need holidays. We wouldn’t have that overwhelming desire to escape. We might be curious to experience other cultures, but with the Discovery Channel and Attenborough and all that, we can hardly claim ignorance.

We don’t travel in search of the new, but in search of the ideal lifestyle, and in search of ourselves. We might even deceive ourselves into believing that Italy, Spain or France is our “real life”, and we have the digital photography to prove it. It makes us a little bit sad these days, a little empty.

If there’s one thing about the economic gloom that’s positive, it’s that we’ve stopped doing shallow. People no longer have breezy how-nice-to-see-you conversations, opening with: “Where are you going on holiday? Last year, and even more the year before, people spoke of the Christmas holiday, the Easter holiday, the summer holiday, the autumn citybreak. Now, bragging about holidays has become as deeply unfashionable as a deep tan. Even people who can afford holidays aren’t talking about them. Leaving the Irish rain behind has become something of a dirty secret.

This has been a beautiful Irish summer. Warmer, sunnier and rainier – as extreme as the economy. But a beautiful day hasn’t much to do with the weather. It’s about being present and patient so that when that moment of beauty comes, you’re there to experience it, even if it’s in your own back garden, if you’re lucky enough to have one. I’m tired of weather conversations. Hope for good weather is a child-like way of being – always waiting in expectation for something good to happen. It’s a survival strategy that Frank McCourt described so well. The more miserable your Irish Catholic childhood, the greater the pay off when something good happens.

But we’re not a nation of Frank McCourts. We’re the fake-tan, cheap-holiday-in-Spain generation. And, unlike McCourt, most of us remember our childhood summers as being sunny. If we were to look at our childhood summers closely, they probably weren’t so great at all, yet we keep trying to recreate them. We pay tour operators to provide them, and if we’re staying in Ireland and have a miserable time, we blame the weather.

Don’t blame the rain. This feeling of deep discomfort with life that has us looking forward to a week or a few in a “sunny” place has never been about climactic conditions. It’s about the lives we’ve created for ourselves; lives that are crashing down around us, if you’ve read the news lately

kholmquist@irishtimes.com