Holiday reading

We used to be told that the great thing about a holiday, in fact the whole point of it, was to get away and rest, just as, for a hundred years or more, the routine advice of the family doctor to anyone who had a cold or who was somehow exhausted or otherwise felt out of sorts was to go home and go to bed.

That was before the late, great Doctor R. Asher gave his funny and brilliant lecture detailing all the appalling things that happen to the body when you go to bed, how the mechanism develops quirks, how the engine starts to misfire, how the whole organism begins to run down. 'When in doubt,' he said, 'stay up and keep moving!' 

I imagine that his audience, which was an audience of doctors, felt it had been caught out and I see them shuffling off, not looking anybody in the eye, since one of their own had revealed to the world the secret of their daily practice, which is to get rid of a bothersome patient in the easiest way on the hunch that he's going to get well anyway. 

As for holidays, practically all travel literature, pamphlets and come-ons of every sort, is based in the assumption that everyone yearns to lie down in the sun by a swimming pool, with a bikini in sight, and maybe indulge in a little shuffle-board and then repair to the Flamingo Bar, or whatever, rest again with a couple of cocktails and then eat a rich and flamboyant dinner, which, they don't tell you, is not a bad recipe for going to bed and getting a heart attack. 

Well, everyone to his favourite poison. It must be obvious by now that my idea of a holiday in hell is a resort. the tropical beach, the daily prostration in blazing sun, the emerging appearance of a boiled lobster, the daily encouragement on insipient skin cancer, the daily drink or meal with strangers. I admit it's easy to scorn such pleasures if that's what they are when you live in a part of the world – New York, for instance – where between May and November, a good deal of the time, is spent staying out of the sun. If you want it, it's there in sickeningly, pitiless doses, especially through June, July and August. 

My own idea of a holiday is to go to another city and while mooching around and enjoying its architecture, if any, to see what makes it tick and watch the people, how they assume that their staple food is essential to life, whether it's couscous in Tunisia, rice in China, meat and potatoes in good old Derbyshire. And how they use different gestures for the same emotions. The Italians, for instance, seem to be beckoning you when they're waving goodbye. In Spain a chorus of whistles from the bullfight crowd is the worst form of booing. And how in Harrods, say, or Bloomingdales' basement, the price marked is the price you pay, whereas in Mexico where I now am, the marked price is indicated as the sporting starting point for a bout of bargaining. 

'Four hundred pesos!' you say, aghast at a rug or a basket or some other bauble you don't need. 'Senor,' the man says, man to man, ' you look interested, you are much intelligent, 350!' 'Ridiculous!' you say with a grin and you walk around the square and come back. He comes back, leaping as at a long-lost friend, 'Senor,' he says, 'welcome again!' And then with a saucy wink, 'You're wanting the rug!' Well, you don't want the rug, you want a margarita. 'You want a margarita?' he screams. He rushes off to the waiter. 'What are you doing?' he bullies, 'My friend wants a margarita. Why do you not attend on my friend?' Now you have two of them at you. 'I tell you,' says the one who is festooned with rugs,’ I make a beautiful bargain. I give you the rug and a basket for 275 pesos.' 

They're such amiable people and the waiter serving up margaritas by now like a water boy succouring some sun-struck tennis player, is so concerned for you and so amazed at the generosity of his friend, the rug salesman that you settle for 225 pesos – a bargain in any country. Except that you don't want a rug or a basket and you curse both of them when the time comes to pack and there's no way to pack either of them. And it cost you several porters to get them back home and you look like an idiot fugitive from a circus juggling the things through customs. But this is the fun of the game, the discovery of new ploys and gambits in the human game or what our professors of sociology call 'non-familial interpersonal relations'. 

The other usual prescription for a holiday which now takes us into the advertisements on the book pages, is to take along a little 'light' reading and this again is something I find deeply depressing, like telling a man who's ragged from the loss of a child or a fortune that he should cheer up and get a hobby. On this trip to Mexico, I took one book and I hope you won't think I'm being superior in not taking along the latest Harold Robbins or even a dollop of the great P. G. Wodehouse. I put it down as an affliction, a compulsion neurosis that I cannot go to any country, or for that matter to any new cit,y and shut off my wretched mind. It goes on ticking, well or badly, and I find the only way to peace and quiet is to feed it information about the place I'm visiting. 

Well, the book is a short, crisp, scholarly history of Mexico. If it had been written on this side of the Atlantic, it might have been magnificent but I'm afraid it might also have been called something like 'Dark Conquerors of the Hinterland'. Instead it's called, in the admirable English fashion, 'A History of Mexico'. It is by Sir Nicholas Cheetham who was the British ambassador to Mexico for four years in the 1960s. A strong hint of why he wrote it is given in the first few sentences of the book and the hint is directed at his own countrymen whose ignorance of Mexico, he discovered, was vast. 

'When the Prince of Wales,' he begins, 'passed through Mexico in 1966, the Times reported him as having visited the Aztec pyramids of Teotihuacan. The August newspaper,' he comments, 'failed to realise that in attributing these famous monuments to the Aztecs, it was committing a fearful schoolboy howler as if it had referred to the Roman builders of the Parthenon or to Sir Christopher Wren as the architect of Canterbury Cathedral. In fact the pyramids had been abandoned centuries before the Aztecs ever reached the Valley of Mexico.' 

Well, I won't say that I bored into these books every day or that I used them for the indecent purpose of slaying friends with Mexican one-upmanship on my return. My own ignorance of Mexico, if not vast, is certainly very great. But it is that I'm simply an itchy type. If I'm in a hotel that looks like a monastery, I want to know if it ever was one. Why do the motorcar horns go peep, peep and not honk, honk? What explains the surprising point made in a little guide I came on last year – a point that must surely produce sharp gasps and winces in Americans, the hygiene maniacs of the world – the guide says in travelling around Mexico, an American should try to be tidy and not, for instance, leave washbasins un-scoured. Americans will find that, on the whole, hotels and motels, both big and small, restaurants chic and humble, tend to be much cleaner than their equivalents in the United States. 

Well, if that's so, then the visiting European, of all people, had better pull up his socks, assuming he's just washed them. Well, to break down and be frank, I didn’t take the history book as a first step in a boning-up project, I take books everywhere, books I may never read because I dread holing up in some foreign room with nothing to read. I once had a schoolmaster to whom I owe a great deal about how to use a library and zero in on the heart of anything that interested me. And he used to say that if the worse came to the worst, he’d read all the way through a railway guide. 

In my boyhood, there must have been an awful lot of Englishmen who lived similar lives of quiet desperation because the Times was always printing scolding letters from the unlikeliest people, parsons and insurance agents and carpenters and classical scholars, who knew every line of Bradshaw's Railway Guide and were shocked to find somebody saying that the train from Penzance to Woking left at 8.10 in the morning instead of 8.13. 

Last year, in Mexico again, I found myself in a hotel room which had absolutely no reading matter except in one drawer an old, browned-off Manhattan telephone book. So, reduced on a hot day to lying there and sitting there with no other literature, I found that the amount of information you can pick up about New York from the telephone book is both staggering and hilarious. There are two pages of Kochs (K-O-C-H-s) but less than a column of Cookes (with an E). It's a strange name to some Americans. I recall the time I was nominated for a television Emmy and the old schnozzola, Jimmy Durante, was the MC. After calling off the nominees, he said, 'Give me da envelope!' And he tore it open, 'And the winner,' he bawled, 'is Alistair Cookee!' 'Cooke,' muttered his assistant. Durante was outraged at this ungentlemanly bit of correction, 'It says Cookee here,' he said. 

There are pages and pages of Kleins and Kleinbergs and Kleinmans, though the lady, an ardent women's libber who went to court to have her name changed is no longer listed as Kugelman, she can now be found as Kugelperson. There are ten pages, forty columns of names beginning with Z which only goes to show that if Shakespeare had been an American he would not have written 'Thou zed, thou unnecessary letter.' 

I found that reading the Manhattan telephone book was not to be recommended at nightfall, it's too full of surprise, suspense and shocks to the nervous system. And if I didn't have a date with a pyramid, pre-Aztec, and after that with a combination of chicken enchiladas, crispy tacos and tostadas packed with beef and salad, not to mention the splendid Mexican beer, I would enlighten you with many more items from the Manhattan telephone book. 

As it is, I must simply leave you with the sobering information which tells you something about the ethnic make-up of New York – that the first proper name in the book is that of John L. Aab (two As and a B) and the last is a man, I'm intrigued to see, lives only two blocks from me. He is Charles Zzzzynza (four Zs – Z-Z-Z-Z-Y-N-Z-A). 

Live and learn!

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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