History repeats itself, why not holidays? The case for taking a trip down memory lane
Children delight in repetition, whether it’s listening to the same song on loop or revisiting a beloved holiday spot. And this yearning for the familiar is something that we don’t always grow out of.
In 1875 poet Julia Goddard wrote of the “golden summertime” – which was a place, in her telling, as much as a stretch of months, where “birds sing cheerily” and “listening breezes” share lovers’ secrets. For many parents, though, the phrase will trigger traumatic flashbacks of last year’s “Golden” summer, when kids across the globe insisted on playing the K-Pop Demon Hunters song of that name on loop for most of their waking hours. “We’re goin’ up, up, up, it’s our moment… Gonna be, gonna be golden…” It’s a repetitive lyric. Now, imagine hearing the whole thing 20 times in a row.
Children love repetition for good reason. Their growing brains are sensitive to patterns; in their earliest years, this is thought to help them acquire language through a process called “statistical learning”. When they’re a little older, they continue to try to decipher the world around them by identifying recurring sounds, sights, themes and ideas.
My son is nine now but he still takes a lot of comfort in doing the same thing over and over again. As soon as it’s summer, he starts pleading with us to be taken to the English coastal town of Whitstable, where we used to go every July or August until two years ago. Our trips would follow a set plan, which Kurt would strictly enforce. We’d get up early and run up a hill near the hotel where we always stayed, from which we could see sheep grazing in the distance. Then we’d return to eat breakfast when my partner was out of the shower and take a cab ride to the harbour, where we’d pick up some cockles, oysters and crab claws at the West Whelks shack. We’d eat on a specific part of the beach and amble westward to another stretch, prized because of its easy access to both a café and some public loos hidden beside a tennis court. The same itinerary, year after year. And it was perfect.
Like my son, I sometimes crave routine and long for this kind of repetition, especially when it comes to holiday escapes. It’s only natural, I suppose, no matter how old we are. When I was his age, it was a family ritual to spend summers on the island of Mitarai, near Hiroshima, where all of our uncles, aunts and cousins would gather for sashimi feasts and fireworks. The centuries-old house, once the site of my ancestors’ soy-sauce factory, was a constant in my childhood spent moving from one London rental house to another.
We all fantasise about the thrill of new experiences but some habits can be equally rewarding. Familiarity reduces mental fatigue, freeing us from the sort of instant decisions that we spend our working lives having to make, and there’s plenty of joy to be found in revisiting old haunts that are part of our personal history. It can teach us something too. “There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered,” wrote Nelson Mandela in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. And he was right. Maybe it’s not too late for me to book another trip to Whitstable this year – or even one to Mitarai, where I could revive an older family tradition.
Yo Zushi is Monocle’s chief sub editor. At time of press for Monocle’s summer newspaper, ‘Med, Mountains & More’, he had yet to sort out his family’s travel plans.
