Why do holidays make me so miserable?

One of the lowest points in my life was reached lying in six inches of tepid, discoloured water in a bath in a resort hotel in Greece twenty years ago. I was in so much pain I had to growl rather than speak. I remember watching a vast orange millipede ooze across the pock-marked ceiling until it was directly above my face, at which point it started to unpeel itself…

I was in too much agony to even think about moving and there was no point in growling for assistance from my wife, because she was inadvertently crushing cockroaches with her bare feet in the deserted hotel kitchen, having failed to locate a light switch while searching for some milk to warm up for me. (Come to think of it, I’m not sure this was exactly one of the highlights of her life, either.) 

I’d suffered a fairly vicious attack of pancreatitis (they’re all pretty vicious, actually), and because I had no idea what it was, kept on tucking into greasy food and alcohol, both of which created waves of pain on a par (so the experts say) with cancer, kidney stones and childbirth. The strongest painkiller we could buy was paracetamol, which was like applying a blister plaster to a severed artery. 

The millipede, by the way, slowly reattached itself to the ceiling and slunk away. I assume that the Good Lord had decided I was already having enough of a crappy time to be going on with.

Reaching home - after a complicated journey involving a night in a hotel in Athens – was glorious. Doctors who could understand you, proper painkillers, one’s own bed, and a lack of monstrous orange insects.

But that was the last time I enjoyed the end of a holiday. Ever since then, without fail, I’ve spent at least three days feeling utterly depressed – sometimes a week. I don’t mean a bit annoyed, or slightly under the weather: I mean ludicrously, inconsolably, wrist-slittingly depressed, horrified by the meaninglessness of existence, and ready to weep at the slightest setback, or to bite the head off anyone unfortunate enough to swim into my ken.

Last summer, I managed to bugger up my right shoulder on the very last morning in Northumbria, and,, as with my Greek experience, that made re-entry into reality’s atmosphere easier to handle.

I’m depressed right now, as this is my first day back from a week in my favourite place on earth – Cornwall. I could pretend I’d feel better if I’d spent two or three weeks there, but I’ve done that in the past, and it has done nothing whatsoever to alleviate my standard bleak post-holiday mood.

I have no idea what causes this alarming dip in spirits – if I knew, I could do something about it. I like where I live, I like my house, I thoroughly enjoy my family’s company, and my life is – to be frank – decidedly pleasant and relatively stress-free. So why do I so loathe returning to perfectly acceptable normality?

Do any of my readers experience something similar? Or do you all arrive back refreshed and beaming and seeing the world around you in a sparkling new light?

Is it just me?