The longing is usually awakened by brochure language and brochure photographs. "Azure blue" seas "lap" against "bleached white" (or "golden brown") sands in a "sun-kissed" paradise. Hotels are "ideally situated", "strategically located" or, if out in the sticks, "enjoy the best of two worlds". Resorts almost always "nestle". Food, when it is not "cuisine", is a "gastronomic delight". The unavoidable grittiness of life is always air-brushed into oblivion.
A brochure staple is to show tanned, dentally sublime couples, their faces locked in a rictus of vacuous pleasure, gazing at "romantic" sunsets which look computer-enhanced and nowadays probably are. Despite the word's off-putting, babywear connotation, you are routinely encouraged to "pamper" yourself. You are often invited to "step back in time" to experience "old world charm", while simultaneously enjoying "luxurious modern facilities". Cocktails in primary colours glint with crushed ice and have mixing sticks and paper umbrellas. In effect, the brochures wind you up to "unwind". In a favourite summarising adjective, everything is "idyllic".
It is a world without rain, delays at airports, lost luggage, sunburn, mosquitoes, surly immigration bureaucrats with unspeakable moustaches, anxiety, boredom, stomach cramps, diarrhoea (which gives a different spin to the injunction to "pamper" yourself) and seven-foot boors reclining just below your throat for most of a four-hour flight. The entire bovine experience - cattle-prods for economy-class passengers can't be far off - of being loaded on and off planes never intrudes on the fantasy. The bizarre mixture of condescension and servility which still characterises air travel is never mentioned.
Still, summer holidays always hold out a promise and, in fairness, regularly honour it. Part of the promise is that, ironically, you will be able to be "more you" by getting away from what you do and who you have become. Yet mass-tourism - and it's unarguably right that more people can afford to travel to the sun - is increasingly giving contemporary travel a flavour of medieval pilgrimage. It's not quite Crusades-style hardship, but overcrowded airports test your resolve by inflicting on you delays, boredom, discomfort and the pervasively bovine feelings these ordeals induce.
At Dublin airport, such ordeals are compounded by the car-parking arrangements. Having parked your car, it's a full and distinct stage of the odyssey just to get to the departures lounge. Likewise when you arrive back. You've landed, endured the interminable claustrophobia of getting out of the stationary plane, suffered the numbing tedium of waiting for and watching suitcases lumbering around a squealing conveyor belt, practically busted your credit card limit to pay for the parked car - and then there's often no bus to bring you to the exorbitant car-park.
None of these pilgrim-like trials ever feature in the brochures or on the TV holiday programmes. In fact, such involuntary Lough Derg-like ancillaries are thoroughly censored by tourism advertising. Serious travel writers know well that the worst trips make the best reading - Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver and even Bill Bryson aren't big on excessive pampering. But when it comes to bombarding you with guff and images, the tourism industry (which, along with arms and oil, vies for the title of the world's largest) aims directly at your imagination by pampering it into forgetting the nasty bits.
It's true, of course, that a bad holiday - the worse the better - can give great satisfaction to people being told about it. The bad holiday seems to have unique appeal to the misanthropic part of even the kindest people. Certainly, few torturers can compete with the jerk who takes illconcealed, smug delight in informing you that you missed the best weather for years in Ireland while you were washed out in some "guaranteed" sun spot. "There's no place like Ireland when the sun shines," they inform you, keen that you should feel not only cheated but a laughing-stock.
So the first rule about holiday anecdotes is to learn from the brochures which persuaded you to go in the first place: leave out the nasty bits. The naked glee of others at your horror holiday is too wounding to be given any encouragement. In Boston, I once saw a bar full of people howl with laughter at television pictures of flooding in Florida. Entire houses were being washed away in torrents and the more horrific the footage, the louder the laughter. The general sentiment was that "sun-kissed" Florida deserved its comeuppance (and, you know, perhaps it did).
Then there's holiday snobbery. "Oh, we love the real Spain." So, you went to a resort, nestled below nothing more beautiful than three miles of high-rise horror, and that isn't the real Spain? Seems to me that it's very real Spain, not perhaps to everybody's taste, but every bit as real as some remote village in which even the Spaniards clearly don't want to live. And anyway, if a place is not touting for tourists, might it not be presumptuous to imagine that you are unquestionably welcome?
BUT then there's a breed of tourist who would rather be considered "travellers" (not mind, in the Irish sense of that word, but in the more lordly, "sophisticated", citizen-of-the-world sense). Being described as a mere holiday-maker or tourist can make you appear rather passive and stained by the bovine nature of industrialised leisure. A traveller, on the other hand, suggests agency and control. You are the boss, and entire countries, even continents, splay themselves for your inspection. "Travellers", even though they may have made their loot from mass consumption, despise consumerism when its principles are applied to maximising profits from "tourists".
Some people seek organised jollity - conga lines, the birdie song, basically Butlins by the Med - and others don't. Some prefer quietness and sanctuary. Some carry on as culture butterflies, flitting from one historic site to the next. Some dedicate themselves to sex and drink and rock 'n' roll. Some want adventure and some - proof that life is strange - even want golfing holidays. But whether you decide to be a trekker in Nepal or a lecher in Ibiza, the advertising pitch, although it varies in tone and in the adjectives it abuses, invariably stresses an idealised perfection.
It is, I suppose, heartening to realise that ordinary working people can now go to more parts of the world than even a duke could have done a century ago. Flight, having made the industrialisation of travel possible, is still a wonder. But few places are exotic any more. Indeed, with 60-year-old Dennis Tito, who made a fortune in pension management, recently paying $14 million to become the world's first "space tourist", can any place on Earth now be genuinely exotic?
ANYWAY, once the holiday season begins, we can be sure that Dublin Airport will again resemble the fall of Saigon. Lest we be put off by the prospect of enduring the scramble, the breathless prose of the brochures will never describe the experience. In fact, the brochures seldom de- scribe at all; they use language and pictures to evoke experiences which guarantee a respite from our normal lives. Sanity and self will be salvaged from some awful grip of pressure or disappointment.
Within a generation, Irish children have become as familiar with Benidorm as with Bundoran. Like the increased quantity and quality of presents for Christmas do for winter, the range and affordability of foreign holidays has transformed summer. Yet greater expectations have their own cost. As a plastic rifle cannot really compare with a Sony PlayStation 2, Courtown is not the Costa del Sol. Then again, holidays, as the brochures know, are substantially in the imagination.
It's not the distance travelled, but the meeting, or even the surpassing, of imagined promises that determines success. You can go to a poor country and pay with pangs of conscience for the value you're getting. Alternatively, you can go to a rich country and pay through the nose. But fun and all as holidays can be, eagerly snapped photographs and video images of them always contain a latent sadness. Documentary-makers know this, because few images are as poignant as good times from your earlier life.
Still, in spite of the suppressed realities of mass-travel, the bovine queueing at airports, sunburn and all the rest, holidays are needed from this gridlocked Tiger. You can go to countries supposedly less well-off than Ireland and find far superior air, road and rail infrastructure. There's also something much more relaxed about life around the warm Mediterranean.
Although industrial-scale tourism has taken much mystery out of the world, it's no simpler or duller than it's ever been. Just beware the brochures.