HOLIDAY ANT-ICS

We passed the workers twice a day. In the early morning we headed for the beach, loaded with flippers, an inflatable boat with a leak, several different strengths of suntan cream and an unexpectedly boring book by John Fowles.
The workers were setting out in a line, one behind the other, along the side of the road. They looked neither to the right nor to the left, but pressed on grimly with their journey. They had done it so often that they had worn a path beside the tarmac. If they thought at all they would not have enjoyed the sight of tourists bound for a relaxing trip to the beach.
In the evening the workers returned home, carrying their burdens or spoils: eggs, pieces of wood, flowers; sometimes they carried each other. They did not know where they had been, or why they had gone out to work at all. They did it because they had always done it, and no doubt it was programmed into their tiny brains.
When the telephone does not ring because there isn't one; when clients do not visit you because it would take them 3½ hours flying time and several hundred pounds to make the journey; when you cannot struggle at the crack of dawn onto a crowded train because there are no trains in hundreds of miles; when nobody asks you to do anything more strenuous than eat, drink cheap Greek wine, and be nice to your spouse and children......
When many other things besides disrupt your entrenched daily routine, you start to do things you do not normally do: like pay attention to
ants.
The ants on the island of Crete come, like packets of detergent, in three sizes _ Giant, Economy, and Large. The large ants (being the smallest) have inferiority complexes and officiously race around, interfering with the other ants. For variety they also sting tourists even when not provoked. The giant ants have low powered brains and little capacity to do anything other than what they are told. They have, one would imagine, all the eloquence and conversational powers of the average football hooligan.
The economy sized ants, being neither one thing nor the other, have the attributes of the traditional jury: male, middle class, middle aged and middle minded.
Sometimes we treated the ants. A teaspoon of honey would have them lining up like homeward bound city commuters at the bar of the Duke's Head or the Ostrich. And like commuters some over indulged, elbowing others out of the way and falling into the middle of the sticky pool.
That was the limit of my study and investigation into Greek ants; a faint interest, easily overwhelmed by a greater interest in painfully roasting my body so that my colleagues would not say, when I returned, that I did not look very brown.
A couple of weeks later, bronzed, feeling uncomfortable in the confines of a tie and suit I presented myself benignly at the office.
Carol, my secretary welcomed me back: "You don't look very brown. Too much time in the bar I suppose."
For two or three days I arrived at 9 am instead of 7.30, saw clients who did not have appointments, took all telephone calls when they happened and chatted freely to any colleagues who cared to listen - almost none. For them their holiday was either a distant memory or too far into the future even to contemplate. They would sit on the edge of their chairs, impatiently fingering their telephones or stealing glances at their files. They said "yes" too quickly at every pause in the conversation and kept glancing at their digital watches.
Then gradually the memories started to fade with the tan.
Two weeks and one major bowel slackening crisis later, I was back to normal working hours - ten or more of them every day and plenty more at the weekends. Appointments were once again banned till the week after next, and our long suffering staff had to deliver a plea in mitigation before even attempting to put through a call.
Why are we all doing it? Our forbears are reputed to have strolled in at ten in the morning and packed up at four. They were richer, probably happier, and suffered from gout instead of heart conditions or ulcers. Nowadays we feel that something is badly wrong if we are not sweating at our desks before sun-up, failing to take proper lunches and arriving home late, grisly and shattered.
For two or three weeks each year we propel ourselves hundreds of miles to sear in the sun, eat unfamiliar food and drink indifferent wine. We generally feel great and rush back home vowing that from now onwards all will be different.
We marvel at the compulsive desire to work of all those we encounter. We watch other people sitting expressionless and grey in traffic jams or crowded tube trains. We wonder which are the large ants, and which the economy sized and giant ants.
Then we stop thinking about ants and holidays as we get up, set off for work looking neither to the left nor to the right, our habits once again so regular that we wear paths through our days.
When the day is over we return home, carrying our carrier bags or our executive briefcases. If asked by our loved ones about our day, we shrug and make meaningless noises. We no longer really know where we have been or why we do it. And if someone else returns from holiday, we scarcely have time to welcome them back, find it impossible to understand why they want to converse, especially as they can see we have a lot of work to do, and so little time in which to do it.
The pressures on the lives of legal practitioners are set to increase still further. In the USA top lawyers now work such long hours that the only thing they ever do at home is sleep. Perhaps the time has come for some serious thought to be given to reducing the pressures of work before the legal profession has one big collective nervous breakdown.

Footnote:
Please excuse the lugubrious tone. That was a description of a past holiday. I need my next one now!

This article first appeared in Solicitors Journal in August 1991