Pack bags. Go to beach. Get sick. For as long as I can remember, this has been the pattern of too many of my summer holidays.
It does not even need to be summer. One Friday afternoon late last year, just as I wrote the final paragraph of a story I had frantically typed out on the plane home after a busy work trip abroad, I began to sniffle. By 10pm, all hope of a cheering weekend off had been killed by a sore throat, temperature and cough. I was in bed until Monday.
The other week, as summer holidays loomed, I told a couple of work colleagues I might look into whether there was any scientific basis for this holiday illness thing. “Do it!” they said, adding it happened to them all the time.