Olé, Olé, Olé, Olé...

Missus O and I spent the long Easter weekend in Ireland, at my parents' house.  For once, the weather was absolutely spectacular.  There was scarce a cloud in the sky the whole time we were there.  It was warm too, so warm in fact that we were able to head down to the North Atlantic coast, which is about 10 miles from their home, and stand on the rocks without sou'westers and harnesses.  Normally in April that far west in Ireland you'd only find people training for Special Forces selection venturing that close to the water.  If the cold doesn't get you, the vicious swell will.  Not this weekend though.  It was lush.

Happiness really simply does boil down to the distance between hope and reality.  To give yourself the best statistical advantage of being cheery, it makes sense to adopt a pessimistic outlook.  That leaves plenty of scope for reality to be better than one anticipates.  When this happens, one's mood lightens.  The bigger the vide between espoir and actualité, the better.  It graphs as a classic eponential curve - a slight increase in the difference rendering a massive uplift in the quality of life.

The flip side of this of course is that when the empirical universe falls short of the Platonic, it grates something fierce.  Even if objectively the conditions aren't really that bad, but they are simply worse than expected, it all shite.  And, again, the larger the gap, the more pronounced one's grimace becomes.  

This weekend, the distance between the lines was huge and for the positive.  The light was splendid; I slept well, ate well, got plenty of exercise.  It was lovely.  Such was to life-affirming effect of the conditions that I even didn't have a face like a spanked arse when the alarm clock went off this morning, heralding my first day back at work.  And that, friends, takes some doing - believe me.

The heat is off

Phew, it's getting warm - a subtle reminder to the populace that it's still technically the middle of summer.  There's a temptation to think the season over now as the World Cup has just ended.  I had to remind Mrs O last night that we had most of our summer jollies still to look forward to, so pucker-up!  This is a shameless role-reversal for me as I'm ordinarily the one with a face like a clattered asshole.  Yet, here I was, bestriding the front room like an upbeat colossus.  I can only suppose this optimism is my unconscious mind trying to deal with triple-digit humidity.

The wife and I usually take our holidays late in the year to avoid the great unwashed and their mewling progeny.  This year we had planned to go to Tel Aviv but John Simpson advised against it.  Instead we're having a series of mini-breaks in Spain and Germany.

On the surface, they're uneasy bedfellows, Germany and Spain, but each offers the wise traveller a wonderful playground in its own way.  People always cock-on about visiting this monument and that restaurant when they're on hols, like it's some sort of Ironman competition.  You're there to relax and enjoy yourself, you dozy twat.  People who claim that they're not interested in a bit of low impact R&R during the vacs and prefer instead to yomp or go pot-holing need an electric shock to the brain, frankly.  When I go on a mini break, I want things to be different, other and new.  What I don't want is onerous.  This is why S&G offer very different cultural mores, but similar experiences.