Your holiday was sun-kissed, was it? How splendid for you. Golden sand, delicious food, delightful people. Yeah, great.
Not much of a story, though. Give us disastrous; give us absurd: the fleapit in Rome that the fleas had already abandoned because they couldn’t work in such conditions. Or the time your daughter sobbed tears of terror in the not unreasonable belief that the gigantic cartoon mouse was bent on eating her whole.
It is such experiences that a new photo blog, Hatecation (hatecation.tumblr.com), seeks to document. Donna Dickens, an American, was inspired to create the site after a trip to a theme park. "Between getting detoured and lost in a corn field for two hours, the dilapidated hotel . . . and seven people trying (and failing) to get along for 36 hours, all did not go as planned. Until we started joking that this was how allvacations went; you think you're going to have fun . . . but you aren't."
The blog has been receiving about 10,000 hits a day since its launch, in August, heart-warmingly revealing a still-robust online appetite for other people’s misfortune. All manner of misery is here, like the vacationers who decided to take a leisurely hike up a hill so satanically vertiginous that, from the top, it resembles the descent into Hades. But you have to climb it first. Or the walkers determined not to let a minor inconvenience like a hurricane get in the way of their seaside stroll.
Water features prominently, generally in the form of people plunging into the stuff at uncomfortable-looking angles, or as Mother Nature spits in the face of tourists by flooding their caravans.
Hatecation’s photos are above all bizarre. One depicts a largely naked man, of a girth most kindly described as elephantine, who has selected the luggage compartment of a coach as the venue for his nap. Sure, why not?
The site also reveals something of the irresistible lure of the photo opportunity. Camera? Check. Functioning index finger? Check. Complete absence of self-consciousness allied with dangerously low IQ? Check. One gent decided it was advisable, perhaps even necessary, for him to insert the greater part of his person into a large (but not quite large enough) tortoise shell. It’s a great shot. And now it’s on the internet, where everybody can point and laugh at him.
Animals, inevitably, feature. Some shots from safari parks remind us that, if you’re going to drive your SUV through a lion’s home, you really have no grounds for complaint if it starts chewing your door handle. There is, furthermore, a healthy dose of old-fashioned stupidity. A sign on a hotel balcony informs guests that it “is not on ground level”.
“Everyone has a vacation photo album; in the attic, on a bookshelf,” says Dickens. “People associate photography with vacation. Stories are funny but don’t quite get the same visceral reaction.”
