From that point on your troubles multiply. After breakfast, since you are on holiday, you cannot sit down in a chair, like a rational being and work or otherwise enjoy yourself. Some demon inside you drives you out into the open air. This usually involves walking — one of the most exhausting of exercises, if persisted in by the novices for long periods. The best view of the bay may be from a chair in a window of your hotel, but, when on holiday, you cannot help believing that it is round the corner, and you set out for it, however steep the local hills may be. The bay was certainly extraordinarily beautiful, with white sails moving across its ruffled surface under the sun, but, as I trudged along its coast on foot, I could not help wishing at times that some less strenuous form of exercise than walking had been discovered. I reckon that during the first week of the holiday my pedestrian hours were from 10 A.M. to 10 P.M. with intervals for meals and one ride on a merry-go-round.
Professor Julian Huxley has been writing on the necessity of organizing leisure, and, no doubt, when this is done, a local committee at every seaside town will take the sedentary visitor in hand and show him how he can enjoy himself without tiring himself. I certainly do not know how. I cannot enjoy myself on a holiday without ending the day as a physical wreck. Golf is an innocent-looking game; but I must say that if I felt as exhausted after a day’s work in the office as I did after a day’s golf in Cornwall I should denounce my employers as tyrants. You may guess how strenuous the golf was from the fact that on the first morning my opponent and I took two hours and a half to get round nine holes. I think the most exhausting part of golf, perhaps, is the stooping required to take the balls out of the hole. And the dreadful thing is that, when once one has begun, one cannot stop playing. There is no hope of relief except to return to work.”
— Robert Lynd
