A long weekend at home is really the best thing you can ever do to treat yourself to some rest and comfort. Most often you are rushing around on holiday, in a strange hotel, with a lot of noisy neighbours and crowds in the pool, and jostling at the buffet, esp if its Goa.

At home the building is strangely silent, as all have gone on holiday. Lovely quiet and peace descends. The loud dogs of the ground floor apartment are silent as they have gone off too. Its wonderful not having anyone around, even the terrace is breezy and quiet. The best holiday I believe is spent at home. Home is where the heart is and one can relax and just be.

We love going to Goa when we get a break, but its no holiday once we leave our little village of Pilerne. All the beaches in North Goa are over run with loud and crass domestic tourists. The beaches are full of gawky men and women with howling kids. Every inch of the beach is covered with those silly beach mattresses on recliners like in the Mediterranean.

One cannot really just sit on the sand and let it envelop you like we love to do. Lower down where the waves come up, the recliners cannot be put, and so we get to sit there, make sand castles and later try to get into the waves to get sloshed upto ones thighs. Those silly tourists dont know what they are missing.

There are people everywhere taking selfies and I sometimes hope they keel over and fall into the crashing waves. There are bottles all over the beach, some broken, so we dare not walk barefoot which we did as kids. Plastic is another curse,- plastic bottles and packets everywhere. Even the cows that wander on the beach eat the plastic and I wonder what kind of plastic milk they must give.

I feel sorry for the foreign tourists ( read white) who walk down from the far away Aguada Beach hotel. They are skimply dressed and the target of selfie loving domestic tourists esp the young men. I shudder when I see them cosy up to a young woman in a bikini taking selfies and hope they behave. To the Indian mind a white woman is ‘easy’, I saw that shocking behaviour when I went to do a Masters in Europe. Our Asian men just did not know how to behave and had to be disciplined and some were even suspended from the course.

The positives in the ‘high’ season is the restaurants and the shacks do roaring business. The crowds loosen their purse strings and enjoy eating at all the little eateries on the beach. What has become a disgusting fad though is gas cylinders and huge dekchis are brought in buses and in the parking area, food is cooked for bus loads, of the cheaper tourist.

Once they are done, huge piles of trash are left behind and are spread across the parking area by the dogs and birds looking for scraps. They rot in the heat and the stink is unbearable.

At home one can relax, eat out or order in for a change. Go out to garden and enjoy the peace and quiet of a silent building. Even the Barbets and the Bul buls start off their chorus a little later in the morning. But I keep to my timing of a jog, as the quiet of the roads are to be savoured and I get to pick a posy of the flowers of the Indian Cork which make a scented carpet on the pavement on St Marks road.