Malone has a dose of post-holiday blues

I go on holiday so rarely that I didn’t know about the common phenomenon that is ‘AHDS’ – After Holiday Downer Syndrome. I feel like I need a holiday to get over my holiday. I’ve arrived back with a stinky cold that I must have caught from the snotty sneezing children on the plane. I feel so ill, it’s all I can do to lie in bed directing my child towards cupboards of food and toys.

The holiday was supposed to rejuvenate me. Instead I feel worse than before I went. I wonder if the daily fuel of €3 rum and cokes (or ‘Ron and cokes’ as they call them in Spain) could have affected my health… Surely it’s tradition to end each day on holiday with a drink on el balcony? I reckon as long as I am not starting each day with a Ron then I’m fine…

“I reckon as long as I am not starting each day with a Ron then I’m fine…”

It was a lovely lazy holiday. No boat trips, no car trips into the undiscovered beauty of the island. Just a nice relaxed regime of melon breakfasts followed by swimming in the sea and lolling on the beach complaining about the sand ‘getting flippin’ everywhere!’ Salads for lunch and then drinking Ron watching the sun go down. But thankfully never come up, as the child slept till 8am every day! It was a miracle! Or perhaps just an indication of how tiring five hours of sea swimming a day (in armbands) can be for a five year old.

The only thing I found tiring was coming home. I felt full of vitality while I was there and then as soon as we landed, I felt like I needed to crawl into a bush to hibernate for winter. Post holiday blues are not helped by the thought that we have another eight months till we get any warm sun in the UK. Last night I slept with socks and a jumper on. What will happen to me when we get to December? I’ll be so cold by then I’ll have to sleep in my coat and boots!

All of my worries about taking the child on her very first holiday were unfounded. She absolutely loved it. It was so hot she
got to run about in her knickers all the time. When you’re five, clothes are for losers.

This made her as a five year old extremely content, that and the sea and sand that offered hours of happy activity. And the
fact that mummy seemed to be letting her have ice lollies whenever she wanted… (for rehydration purposes).

The other holiday tradition that I am engaging in is to romanticise the other country and imagine that living there would be easier and more pleasant than this country. Blowing my nose and googling ‘el apartamentos’. A life where children are content with the simple things such as sea and sand, and a swim a day keeps the colds away! And Ron keeps mummy happy!