Britain--On Twenty-four Hours a Day

LAST year I spent ten months in the British Isles. Well, it was really only a little more than three springtime weeks, and one week on board a ship coming back the relaxing way. The rest of the ten months I was there in spirit, as I pored over ads and folders and re-read the great English novels and poems and made and re-made itineraries. Was this a flagrant violation of the twenty-four-hour-a-day program? Not as I have come to understand it as the result of an article that appeared last year in the Grapevine at just the right moment for me. Speaking of her own first sober trip abroad, the author said that of course one had to plan beyond the moment--but one shouldn't try to plan the results. This was a wonderfully releasing and sensible thought. It freed me to enjoy thoroughly the advance preparations for the trip; and it freed me equally to be open to the unexpected and be undismayed by it. It prolonged the pleasure of a necessarily limited vacation, without injecting into it any sense of rigidity or frustration.