Well, I did restrain myself for almost all my holiday - and only looked at e-mails in the last couple of days when my thoughts turned to any briefings I might need to pick up the reins on my return.  And in the meantime my stand-in PA, Zara Smith, had done an excellent job of filtering messages so that there were not too many absolutely urgent tasks awaiting me on my return today.

As a geographer with particular interests in the ways people live their lives in specific environments, I always find holidays stimulating to academic thinking.  Indeed any travel to a different place has the same effect.  This year my holiday was in central Italy, in many cases revisiting places I had first visited 20, 30 or even more years ago. I first visited the area when I was an undergraduate student, hitch-hiking from place to place and staying in youth hostels (or occasionally in fields or on the floors of hotel outhouses).  I wish now that I had been more observant then.  Had I rigourously collected data then on commercial outlets, the times of day when people did things, the numbers and types of people around, I would have the possibility now of some fascinating longitudinal comparisons. 

In the early 1970s I chose a southern Italian region as one of two case studies for my doctorate thesis - on how small rural communities adapt to the arrival of tourism. I have never actually returned to area (the Cilento region of southern Campania, 140km beyond Naples) since I completed my fieldwork.  But I was minded to do so sometime as a result of what I saw on my holiday this year. Last week I visited a village in Tuscany that I first went to nearly 40 years ago.  Then I slept in a tiny tent in a rudimentary campsite in an olive grove.  There was only one hotel in the village, and a couple of restaurants, and at some times of the day it was possible to be alone in the main street, even in August.

Today I stayed in a hotel converted from a priory on the edge of the village, having chosen from the 20 or so hotels now available.  It was very difficult to secure a table for an evening meal at one of the 25 restaurants, but that was nothing compared with the difficulty in securing a car parking space - 8 Euros for 4 hours in the evening, although on the day we left the village to drive to our next destination all the car parks were full and there were backlog queues of up to a kilometre on the entry roads.  A long conversation with the waiter in our hotel turned on the subject of the unsustainability of ordinary life in the place now - 3 months of tourist-induced hell in the summer followed by 9 months of dormancy when the place effectively shuts up and goes back to how it was when I first went all those years ago.

I turned away from researching tourism because at the time I could find little of theoretical interest to sustain me.  Sometimes, as over the last week or two, I see that there were and are interesting questions to be answered about the growth of the activity.  Perhaps I'll come back to some of them when I retire!