Happy Holidays? Apparently not!
According to a recent survey holiday makers across Northern Ireland start thinking about coming home just three days into their summer vacation.
It’s something we save up for all year, and then can’t wait to complain about when we get back: yes, the great holiday season is upon us, and we’ll be flocking in our thousands to beach resorts around the world.
Many of us, of course, prefer to keep things a bit less exotic, and essentially swap the UK for somewhere quintessentially like home, just with a bit more sun – hence the popularity of places like Marbella, Benidorm and Fuenguerola: resorts where you can find pubs, a cooked breakfast, and the Premier League on Sky TV.
So why even go away when it seems like all we want to be is back at home? Well, it seems we always miss things we don’t have.
Supplies for Candles, the candle scents experts, surveyed 1,000 people to ask how long into a 2 week summer holiday abroad most people started missing their home– and, shockingly, on average, us home birds in Northern Ireland started pining for our homeland after just 3 days!
Never mind whether they were soaking up the sun’s rays on the Costa del Sol, or living it large in Ibiza – no, they wanted to be back in Northern Ireland, where the weather is gloriously unpredictable. This compares unfavourably to the English – they only started thinking about home after 4.7 days.
Nostalgia has a funny effect on people. It’s the sensation of being drawn to a different place, in a different time. It’s the reason 80s music festivals like Rewind are so popular, and that 90s fashion still weasels its way into our high street stores.
For many of us wage slaves, chained to our desks, nostalgia makes us think of summer holidays we spent as kids: with buckets and spades, perhaps in a tent, no doubt eating croissants, and getting a bit of sunburn.
To find out more about our relationship with nostalgia, and scent, Supplies for Candles
then asked which smells people loved the most from home, and the fragrance which came out on top was the smell of pubs and stale! In second place was the enticing smell of baking bread you get wafting throughout supermarkets.
There’s nothing, however, like the unique smells of summer – vastly different from the scent of autumn, say, with its crisp leaves and smoky bonfires, or winter, with its slush and pine trees.
And Northern Ireland’s favourite summer smell is that of freshly cut grass; nearly half of us love sniffing the aroma of a newly mown lawn, with its heady, ‘green’ scent. Salty sea air tantalises us enough to vote it in second place, making us think of beaches and boat trips.
‘Scent is almost more powerful than photographs when it comes to evoking and triggering memories,’ says Nick Story from Supplies For Candles. ‘It’s no surprise that, universally, we all enjoy smells like freshly cut grass, or barbecues. Our advice is to enjoy the summer, with all its many scents!’