I feel sure the management of this hotel have somehow tampered with our clocks and calendars, because today did not feel like the 14th day of the holiday. That would be quite a neat trick to make some extra money - to skip or shorten days (less than 2 hours shaved off a day would mean a whole day in a fortnight break), but still charge people for the full two weeks. It gets so confusing with the time difference anyway and you could probably utilise that confusion to make people think that the unsynchronised time/date difference when they get home is down to the nuances of international travel.
It might be prohibitively expensive to set up false sunrises and sunsets and pay actors in the resort and the holiday destination in general to go along with the deceit, but you know what it costs a lot to build a hotel anyway. And you'd soon be coining it in with your extra days room charges. Thinking about it, it'd probably not be cost effective to just lose a day as then you'd miss out on money from meals - unless you were an all-inclusive resort- so shaving time off each day and setting up false dawn and dusks (you could surely get people into some kind of biosphere like in the Truman Show where all of this stuff would be under your control) and having trick clocks and so on, would be the way to go. In many ways going to a holiday destination does involve artifice anyway. You fly thousands of miles to visit a foreign country, but often times you spend most of your time in a resort which gives little to no representation of the place you're in and which is a little sealed bubble of non-reality.
Anyway, maybe time has just been passing fast because we've been having fun. But it was hard to get it to sink in that we were going home tomorrow.
And my mind was already trying to decompress, turning to what would be happening on my return (mainly playing myself at snooker), making the usual high-minded plans to sort out my life, get fit, get efficient at work and improve myself intellectually. You've been with me long enough to know that none of this stuff ever works, but still I hope that I might be able to reinvent myself as a new, efficient and less fat person. This time it will definitely happen. I've been dipping into
Oliver Burkeman's book "Help!" over the last week or so and it's a fun and interesting read, but pretty much all I have taken away from it is that my email inbox is a mess. I don't use any folders and replied emails, junk emails and emails I've forgotten to respond to are there in my inbox, going back for two or three years. So taking Burkeman's advice I created an "Archive" folder and put everything from my inbox into it (having gone back about three weeks to check I wasn't losing anything vital), and from now on will have only unprocessed emails in my inbox. So I can deal with them efficiently.
That's the theory anyway and Burkeman was right, there is something very satisfying about having nothing in your inbox at all. This might be the only thing that changes in my life (and I will probably fail to keep it up) but as the author points out, these tiny changes are more realistic and might make us slightly happier. Being on holiday and getting to see my emails in chunks once or twice a day I do realise quite how many of my emails are just from businesses or mailing lists that I don't even attempt to read. From now on they will get deleted and out of the way, for me to be able to deal with the three emails a day that I get that aren't directly trying to sell me something.
But apart from that I just sat by the pool, mulling over an idea for a kids' book that I've been thinking about for some time, reading about Hitler and self-help, making notes about what I should be doing with my life and watching the world go by. There was an annoying aquarobics lesson in the morning, mainly because they seemed to have chosen the most deliberately annoying music possible to dance to (though nice to hear the Cheeky Girls again). It's almost like they're trying to make me happy to be going home.
And though I'd like to have stayed for another day or two (if the hotel hadn't cheated me of that time through trickery) I am looking forward to getting back on with stuff. Even if I fail to read or exercise or work efficiently, 2012 is going to be a big year for me and not just because all of humanity will be wiped out as the Mayan calendar comes to an end (even though it isn't doing that). Some stuff's going to change, even if I will stay essentially the same.
