Photo essay

by Renée Otmar

The holiday of our lifetime

Holidays are important. They give us time away from the everyday pressures of work and other responsibilities and offer respite from the routine and the mundane.

In my thirties and forties I expected my holidays to compensate for a rising debt in sleep and physical rest. These days my expectations involve feeding a voracious appetite for adventure in food, sightseeing, art and culture. The balance of daily activities is tipped away from a focus on the mental and intellectual pursuits of work to the delights of the physical and material world in some other place.

And I tend to anticipate a rush of creative activity when I return home. To whit, this photo essay, which I’m starting at three am on this Friday morning in late July, accompanied by a cup of hot cacao and the staccato beat of heavy rain on the roof of our home on the surf coast of Victoria.

It’s mid-winter here in the deep south-east of mainland Australia. This year, residents have already endured more than two months of a particularly bitter-cold season and there is little sign of abatement. I’m not what you’d call a “fan” of the cold weather, especially our version of cold, which is wet and dank and unrelenting – but not cold enough for snow and that kind of winter optimism.

I find it particularly harsh when, as now, I have returned from sojourning in warmer climes. As I struggle for weeks on end to fend off jet lag and the indignity of thirty hours stuffed into what is effectively a tin can hurtling itself across the globe, my sun-soaked, windswept body grows stiff and numb. My sensitive skin bristles as I swap soft summery cottons, bamboo, linen and silk for heavy woollens and winter-tight synthetics. Stuff happy toes, now accustomed to the carefree comfort of walking sandals, into rigid, bursitis-inducing winter boots.

I have long held the view that when I travel such vast distances in a short time, my body may be ever-present in the new place, but my soul is taking the scenic route home. Some call it discombobulation. Either way, this liminal state offers an interesting juncture for reflection – on the present as well as what has been and what is yet to come.

Time presents itself as both a sweet luxury and a twisted nightmare. And yet, as any quinquagenarian (and those who have surpassed us in age) will probably attest, there is no emotional aspect to its inexorable march. Time waits for no one.

For this holiday, we spent a month in the United Kingdom – specifically, in the counties of Cornwall, Somerset and Dorset, in that order, and naturally also in London. It was a glorious time. I had been to London several times before but had never felt warm there. Now, I marvelled at the sight, at nine pm or later, of Londoners and tourists gathering joyfully in balmy evening sunlight, wearing the lightest of summer clothes. Young people frolicking barefoot on the lawn in Soho Park. I was warm in London, and I loved it.

In this time in England, I revisited familiar sights and took in a great deal that had hitherto been known (to me, at least) from the distance of a book, a television show, an anecdote from a friend. And in doing so I came to discover within myself a new perspective of the country, its landscapes, cultures, histories and peoples.

I spent my childhood and teenage years in South Africa, the country of my birth and that of my parents and their parents before them. There, growing up in opposition to the apartheid regime, my entire outlook on all that was British was as an anathema. This, even though I knew that somewhere in my ancestry lurked the blood of an Englishman. Could you find a more British name than Norton, my father’s surname? Think of all the settlements and villages in England named by their location in the north: Midsummer Norton, Chipping Norton and so on.

But I digress. The point is this: even though English became my dominant language and the language defining my professional life, and though English literature and poetry made my heart sing – still does – I harboured a quiet resentment against all that was British. The source of this antipathy was, of course, the country’s brutal domination over the many countries and nations it colonised over centuries, including South Africa, where I was caught in its cultural and economic stranglehold.

The nearly four decades I have lived in Australia – and perhaps the decades in themselves – have dampened the fiery outrage that consumed my early life. In truth, my privileged life here has turned my head so far from that extreme, to the extent that in 2023 I would consider spending a month of leisure in the United Kingdom. This, in itself, says a lot about me and about our changing world.

Once I arrived there, I opened myself to this new experience of the once-Great Britain. To visit, to enjoy a new yet also deeply familiar culture, on its own turf and its own terms. In the restaurants, cafés, tea rooms and pubs, and on the busy country roads and quiet laneways. On the clifftops, beneath deep valleys and on the wide and windy heathlands, the meadows bursting in flower. In the art galleries, museums and shops, and on the River Thames. In the home of a friend.

Naturally, at first I greeted this new/old Britain – this frenemy – with deep suspicion. Then I shook myself: get a grip, I thought. This visit was taking place in a new era and by a different me.

The past is indeed a foreign country.

About these photos

The photos in this essay were taken by the author of the post, using a smartphone.

Copyright © 2023 Renée Otmar
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London, a city of contrasts

Greenwich gem

Cornwall

Bookshops and book displays

Food! Glorious food…

Galleries and museums

Helston, Cornwall

Marazion and St Michael’s Mount

St Ives and surrounds, Tate Modern, St Ives Museum

Salisbury Cathedral and the Magna Carta, Wiltshire

Falmouth and the National Maritime Museum

Bath, Somerset and the ancient Roman Baths

Dorset and surrounds

Hampton Court Castle, Greater London

Tate Modern and Victoria & Albert Museum, London