HOLIDAYS IN CHERNOBYL

Had a good old moan today. You know the kind of thing: a therapeutic vent, a whinge, a classic expulsion of old-fashioned rantery.

Clive had got me started on tourism. I said I didn’t like it when a tourist attraction (The Eiffel Tower, the Grand Canyon, the Isle of Capri, etc) was spoiled by actually being a massive tourist attraction. Take a weekend break to Paris, I wagered, and any day of the year, several hours of your trip will be consumed by queuing up, with other tourists. I don’t believe anyone goes to a tourist attraction for the other tourists; neither do I think you get an authentic experience of a place which is famously beautiful, serene, grand... when it’s continually surrounded by people on holiday. They never show the crowd in the brochures, do they? Yet 365 days per year, in daylight hours... there they are, blocking the light.

But of course, as I went on, I realised the inbuilt hypocrisy of trying to be a tourist without being a tourist. I am the crowd; the crowd is me. Perhaps some things you just have to live with. Like me, moaning over-dramatically to comic effect in the office. Clive chuckled at that.

Marie, who’d been eavesdropping a few desks away, sent me a link to holidaysinchernobyl.com, or whatever it was; some enterprising scheme offering holidays in unexpected places - including Chernobyl, the radioactive Ukrainian wasteland, devastated by a nuclear reactor explosion in 1986.

“Physics, history, protected wildlife. And no crowds!” she said, pointedly.

The link showed pictures of plants strangling crumbled soviet brickwork, empty shells of houses, and decaying concrete chimneys jabbing into a dull grey sky.

I have got to stop complaining at work.