Great holidays can fuel our intellectual passions

In the summer of 1968, I was holed up with my cousin in my parents’ house on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border. I might have said that we were “house-sitting”, but I never heard that expression until several years later.

We spent the time fell-walking and reading, with occasional trips to the pub and to football matches once the season started. But during one of those walks, having read some of Rousseau’s Confessions that morning, I achieved a state of clarity about certain ideas that went on to serve me extremely well in terms of publications and many other respects.

So does that count as a holiday? It may seem an obviously silly question, but it’s a necessary one to ask if you regulate academic employment as if it were normal employment.

Most anglophone universities now stipulate a maximum of somewhere between 26 and 30 days of annual leave, not including national statutory holidays. Yet when I started work on a full-time salary a year later, in 1969, the assumption was that you weren’t required to turn up in any of the 22 weeks of vacation unless there was a good reason, so I did tend to go travelling for six weeks or more in the summer vacation – only much later redefined by administrators as the “fourth term”.

Attitudes to holidays vary as much as anything can in human culture. I have met people who boast that they haven’t had a holiday in five years. By contrast, my own boastfession is that I have been on holiday approximately 500 times. Of course, it all depends on what you mean by a holiday and the starting point must be the definition used when the Office for National Statistics began producing statistics on holidays in 1970: four nights away from home for primarily recreational purposes. But what you understand by “recreation” depends on taste.

For me, a holiday always needs a sporting dimension, in the sense that some cultural sociologists have required as a necessary condition of sport that there must be a “narrative of risk and achievement”. Forgetting airport problems for a moment, if you go to a hotel, eat your meals and lie in the sun, there’s nothing worth narrating, minimal risk and zero achievement. I would prefer to get three successive ducks on a cricket tour or get drenched on a mountain or have my offering slated at a conference than to have no tale to tell.

I went on 26 cricket tours, and must have been to hundreds of conferences. Family holidays would also be in the hundreds because we took to going away in the “half-terms” as well. By which, of course, I mean reading weeks. For the record, I spoke strongly against these on educational grounds, but when I lost this battle, I noted that students casually referred to them as “half-term” or “the holiday” and I was off; you can read anywhere, after all.

It is also the case that academic travel allowed recreational possibilities that more conventional business travel did not. I have a neighbour who went to Beijing a dozen times, but never saw the Forbidden City because he was there to talk about power stations. But in my experience, conferences in interesting places often came with social events and tourism laid on, and most people, including the notoriously industrious Americans, could take a few days off.

I could probably debate for hours with surviving teammates as to our best cricket tour, but I have no doubt about the best conference. It was the Joint Sessions of Workshops of the European Consortium for Political Research in Barcelona in 1985. I arrived early to arrange accommodation for friends in those pre-internet days and, having completed my task, sat in a cafe in the Plaça de Catalunya to watch the world go by. There were a smattering of youths with radios to their ears, which steadily grew to a multitude. By the time Barcelona FC had won in Valladolid to clinch their first league title since the death of Franco there were more than half a million people on the streets.

The rest of the week was a fiesta, with conferees entertained generously every night by the university, the stock exchange, the mayor and the government of Catalonia. My wife came out and we went to Barcelona’s home game against Gijon, which was a continuation of the party and a celebration of Catalan culture, which Franco had suppressed. At the same time, Spain was formally joining the European Economic Community; the city was in a festive mood of a kind I’ve never seen before or since. As Barcelona’s manager was an Englishman (Terry Venables – “El Tel”), the English were particularly welcome.

I have no recollection of what my workshop was about, however, nor of what I gave a paper on. So was it primarily a holiday in the end? Well, not really, because my conversations and background reading about football and Catalan identity inspired an academic interest in the politics of sport that is still an important part of my life 40 years on.

Ultimately, those of us who see ourselves as having an intellectual rather than an organisational purpose never really know whether we’re on holiday or not. So even if the precise regulation of holiday time has to exist formally, it is probably best ignored.

Lincoln Allison is emeritus reader in politics at the University of Warwick.