Fresh off his holiday (as those across the pond call it) Grandad at Head Rambles is already back with a vengance.

Mad Cow Harney is back destroying the Health Service. Ahern is appointing his pay-off cronies to high places. Dangerous criminals are being released from prison “by mistake”. And I hear Paris Hilton is on hunger strike? How do they know? Who gives a sh*t?

The holiday certainly got his juices flowing again.  Chip Scanlon, Chip on Your Shoulder says there is a good reason. 

Chip writes mainly for newspaper journalists, but what he says certainly applies to anyone who writes, even for fun.

Writers are never on vacation, Scanlon says.

However you take them, vacations are crucial to our personal and family health, argues Joe Robinson, author of “Work to Live,’ which examines the reasons why Americans find it difficult, if not impossible, to take time off.

Robinson is one of my heroes because he is leading the movement for a minimum of three weeks vacation here in the US.  I can here Suburban Hippie and Redneck Diva, and all the other moms roaring their indignation.

Scanlon, on the other hand, needs his head examined.  He says a vacation can be a walk around the block or a five minute phone call to a friend.

Vacations were never a tradition in my family (other than trips to the town beaches). Once I entered my teens, work intervened, ranging from caddying to mowing lawns. Two decades as an over-achieving reporter left me ill-prepared to take off blocks of time. When I did take vacations, my expectations were so high that the trips never lived up to the standards I set.

He likes to take two or three days at a time, or even one day in the middle of the week to enjoy shopping the empty mall or attending a movie in an empty theater.  I can’t argue with that, but this walk around the block theory is bunk.