Holidays : All about going away and staying at home, about sunburn, seagulls and family

Holidays : All about going away and staying at home, about sunburn, seagulls and family
ISBN: 9780733633126
Publication Date: 11 November 2014

'A holiday is a time when you do lovely things that you never get a chance to really do otherwise.' So Iris McInnes told her youngest son, William, as she tried to explain the meaning of a holiday.

This book is about the Australian love affair with holidays. It's about going away and staying at home. It's about the relaxing times you had as a kid, escapes you have with your children and the stories you hear from your friends. It can be about a romantic sunset, the spare seat at breakfast being taken by an attractive stranger, a miraculous airline upgrade - or missing bags, unfortunate rashes and wrong turns that lead to places you definitely did not intend to go. But most of all it's about being in your backyard in an above-ground pool, floating in circles, staring at the clouds as you go round and round, and knowing as you float that life is sweet because you're on holidays.

Read Caroline Baum's Review

William McInnes has a rare gift of taking the ordinary, the everyday - dare I say it? - the banal and commonplace and elevating it through sheer understated, bloke-next-door charm. It's a rare knack, and one he has already deployed to considerable effect in earlier books with trademark laconic dry humour.

His theme here is deceptively modest but he nails it with a combination of nostalgia and clear-eyed observation of modest rituals and tribal behaviour, like a suburban anthropologist who has been spying on the neighbours over the back fence. The skills he's developed as a keen bird watcher are equally well applied to the human species.

About the Author

William McInnes is one of Australia's most popular stage and screen actors. His leading roles in Sea Change and Blue...