Mr Golightly's Holiday Read Online Free PDF Page A

hold with ‘dead’ milk in cartons – half a dozen eggs, some local cheese, tomatoes and a couple of brown rolls.
    ‘You staying at Spring Cott?’ asked the young man, cramming too many tomatoes into a tiny paper bag.
    ‘Yes, indeed. A pretty location.’
    ‘All right for toads! Damp as hell. Wouldn’t catch me there, that’s for sure.’
    Why this is hell, nor am I out of it…
    As Mr Golightly walked back down the hill, some words,which had always struck him as particularly grim, rang in his mind. But better not to meet trouble halfway – there were boiled eggs and toast to look forward to, he was on holiday and here to revise his great work.
    Many years earlier Mr Golightly had written a work of dramatic fiction which, after slow initial sales, had gradually grown to become a best-seller. In time, the by-products of this enterprise had expanded to form the basis of a worldwide business. The work had been based on his observations of human life – its loves, hopes, fears, lusts, idiocies, anxieties, false securities, vanities, dishonesties, fantasies, cruelties and general tendency to inveterate folly. Mr Golightly, in his droll way, liked to describe his work as a ‘comedy’; but in this, he had discovered, he resembled the playwright Chekhov.
    Chekhov, attending the dress rehearsal of one his plays, was surprised to find that the director, none other than the great Russian Stanislavsky, was playing it as a tragedy. There were no laughs, Chekhov was tickled to find, except those provided by the single audience of the humorous playwright himself.
    Mr Golightly’s magnum opus had something of The Cherry Orchard ’s ambiguity. Perhaps it was this, or perhaps it was the gradually reducing sales – though to be sure it had had a good enough run: for years it had been an international sensation – which had determined him to rewrite the work. The idea had come to him when, one evening, he had turned on the TV and had become engrossed in one of the many soap operas which run there.
    Mr Golightly’s business was so time-consuming that often he remained ignorant of the rapid developments of modern culture. His philosophy was that if a thing was going to catch on it would, in the fullness of time, catch up with him. That millions of people organised their lives so as not to miss their personal ‘soap’ was news to Mr Golightly.
    But herein lay one of the gifts which made him unique in his sphere. Far from being shocked, or taking an ‘it wasn’t like that in my day’ attitude (a common trap among the older generation), he saw at once the advantages. His own work, he felt, after sampling the current TV output, had many of the features of a modern soap – it was merely the idiom and the episodes which needed bringing up to date. The characters in his original drama were only apparently unlike those of the present day. Human nature hadn’t changed, of course, but custom had, and the times.
    And then there was that delightful notion of a holiday…
    Mr Golightly had been taken by an item concerning ‘stress in the office’ which had followed Neighbours , the soap his secretary watched and for which he had found he himself developing a liking. Stress, it seemed, was a recently discovered malady and one, Mr Golightly couldn’t help feeling, that he could be a candidate for. It seemed there were all kind of palliatives available to combat it – t’ai chi, reiki, Pilates, yoga, reflexology, hypnosis, homeopathy, psychotherapy, acupuncture, massage – but something in Mr Golightly baulked at these remedies which, so far as he was able to grasp them, struck him as somewhat invasive.
    But a ‘holiday’ was a different story: that harked back to a former era – a time when he had been able to rest on his laurels and had taken delight in all he had achieved. And what better plan than to combine a long overdue rest with a reworking of his great enterprise?
    No one but an artist knows the peculiar delight of being