There is one thing about my bank holiday weekend I didn't mention. Now, as you read through my postings you may get the idea I am an old curmudgeon. Possibly it is true, however there are moments when I am quite rightly irritated.

As i drove back up North I listened to a program that verily made my blood boil. The subject for discussion, on what ever it was that Radio 4 was broadcasting, was the taking of "career breaks". This is the concept of taking a sabbatical basically. It used to be academics that were the only people that were able to take what amounts to an unpaid holiday. However it now seems it is a possible strategy for the rest of us too.

This was an interesting concept at first. In the list of variables you needed to have to be able to get away with it, were and understanding employer (who would give you your job back), the ability to be able to save enough to pay for the time off and finally family members up for it too. The employer bit would be most peoples stumbling block and judging from the programme you would need to be an "educated professional" with highly specialised skills. All the people who were interviewed for the family were of this ilk.

My hackles only became raised when it was revealed what it was that these people had done with their sabbatical. The family in question had been talking for some five minutes on all the preparation, planning and sacrifice they had to make to get it to happen. But at the end the interviewer asked what had happened in their year off. Cool as a cucumber the fella announced he took up cold water swimming and ended up swimming the channel. This pattern was repeated in a another couple who ended up climbing Everest. In fact only one couple of the five had done anything near normal which was an extended holiday to Peru with their family as a kind of last hurrah before the children were finally allowed to grow up.

All these parents extolled this break as some kind of rite of passage that they owed to themselves. At the end of the programme the announcer even extolled to us to go for as we knew we deserved it. As if all us listeners out there spent their lives saying "OMG I'm over 40 and i still haven't climbed Everest/wrestled a Great White/discovered an ultimate cure for everything/any other world changing event that usually comes along every hundred years but these people think of as a reasonable life goal!

And here is my problem. There is some sort of mass hysteria work i would like to call "Middle Class Angst". I see and hear it across the media, People who consider the feeding of their family as a "constant dilemma". Then there are these groups who seem to think that if they are not being exceptional they are not being true to themselves. If they cannot circumnavigate the globe with nothing more than a tin bath and an old pair of pyjama's they have not truly lived.

For crying out loud it is within my living memory that the first single handed non stop trip around the world by Robin Knox-Johnston took place (and they thought he was dead for some of it). Man has only just (in geological time scale) travelled to the moon. Just what can you reasonably expect to achieve in a lifetime?

It reminds me of a part of the Hitch hiker's Guide4 to the Galaxy when the eponymous hero Arthur Dent meets a archaeologist. An archaeologist who has a stress inducer, because modern science having cured all known ills, had discovered that people actually achieved more when they at least thought there was half a chance they were about to die or be horribly injured.

Perhaps these people actually don't have enough to worry them unlike the rest of us