Leaving Lazy Tasty Land

In this time of the year, we are all leaving our favourite vacation resort and returning back home. This could make us feel sad, as we face a new period of work, cold and darkness, also called wintertime. It could also make us feel sad for a totally different reason: the embarrassing feeling that maybe, we didn’t reach every destination we wanted, and maybe, even worse, we didn’t enjoy vacation time enough. In some cases, you might even raise the most prohibited of all questions: why didn’t we stay at home?

In the Middle Ages, vacation and travelling for vacation would have seemed a totally unreal activity. For most people, attending a fair at the occasion of a yearly holy day was the top of happiness. Everything beyond that belonged to the world of the dreams. The ultimate dream was the magic Land of Cockaigne, where no work needed to be done, and where food fell from the trees to eradicate all hunger. In Dutch this land was better known as “Lazy Tasty Land” (Luilekkerland). Having food and rest was considered enough to fulfil all desires; travelling would not have made any sense for the inhabitants of the Land of Cockaigne. Yet medieval people would consider today’s vacation resorts as lands of Cockaigne, as food and rest seem to be available there abundantly.

Every new year again, vacation time promises us a Land of Cockaigne, but does it also keep that promise? When we look back, we often notice that we can only enjoy vacation time in rare moments. What we do in reality is quite different from what the peasant, the soldier and the clerk are doing in Pieter Bruegel’s painting above. Let me give an overview: we burn fuel in traffic jams on the highway. We pay for using dirty lavatories, overloaded highways, scarce parking spaces and for all types of limited validity road vignettes. We get stressed from missing connections in railway stations and from unexpected strikes. We fill in forms for missing luggage and discuss visible and invisible scratches in recently hired cars. We get irritated from the selfie takers who didn't notice our intention to take that same shot. Let us thank God vacation time is almost over, and we can soon go home.

And then, amidst all the horrors of vacation, something unexpected happens. We discover a quiet place. We have a pleasant evening dinner with a glass of local wine. We take our best picture. We have an interesting chat with locals or with colleague-tourists. Then, and only then, we know why we came in the first place and why we may travel again next year. And we might recognise that travelling is a privilege, as it reveals that the magic of real places is no less than the magic of the Land of Cockaigne.

Picture 1: Land of Cockaigne by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Alte Pinakothek, Munich. This is a freely licensed work, as explained in the Definition of Free Cultural Works.
Picture 2: Wim Lahaye, taken at Zadar, Croatia