Ultimate holiday app

This view may be a little eccentric, but here it is anyway :-

Holidays can be an ambiguous experiences. We live our lives within a whole array of familiar props, certainties and comfort blankets such as a home, family, friends, occupation and social status. We make a nest of these things, but every now and then we fly away from the nest to some other, temporary nest.

We call it taking a holiday.

Hour after hour of preparation, travel, special clothes, reservations and bureaucracy before we even arrive at our chosen destination, knowing full well we'll only have to go back home again, back to the nest. I recently overheard two people talking about their exotic holidays in a mildly competitive way. As they made their moves, my mind followed their conversation with my own images of sun, hotels, night-life and beaches. They described their holidays pretty well.

I could almost see the brochure.

So was I inspired to rush off and book an exotic holiday myself? No - not really. In my imagination I've sampled their holidays with the help of images stitched together from a lifetime's store. Not the actual images, but alternatives matching their descriptions. A series of holiday photofits in my head.

Are my images so radically different to their memories? Less vivid perhaps, but are they that much less real, that much less satisfactory, especially once the holiday is over? After all, I have the benefit of missing out the journey, the airport queues, bureaucracy and petty frustrations.

I'm not making an entirely serious point here of course, but neither am I wholly convinced about the benefits of holidays. The memories fade so quickly don't they? Maybe a facsimile will do.

So maybe one day folk will just download a holiday app onto the chip implanted in their heads at birth. The app will make them think they've been on some exotic holiday, but the images will be programmed to fade so that next year they have to download another.

Think of the advantages!