The seriously cool have a mollusc in one hand and a mobile in the other

SHE was walking through a graveyard in a bikini, managing a crisis in her office. Not that it looked, at first glance, like a graveyard.

It looked like a white sand beach thickly edged with seashells. Every now and again, the woman in the bikini would bend to pick up a perfect conch or scallop shell from the abundance that give the area its nickname: the Seashell Islands.

But the fact is that seashells are the post-mortem remains of what were once living organisms. So the tourists with their net bags, systematically selecting shells to take home with them, are graverobbing, in a clean, sunshiny way.

The woman walking at the water's edge, however, was mostly focused on her mobile phone conversation.

Sometimes she'd stop, the waves dribbling over her bare feet, and concentrate, her hand shielding her closed eyes as she tried to visualise what the person on the other line was talking about.

Sometimes she'd gesture, as if her auditors were in front of her. Phrases floated past, truncated by the shouts of children and the crunch on sand of arriving cars.

"Impact of costcutting," was one of those phrases.

"The figures from Hutchens, Kansas. They need to be worked up," was another.

It's tempting to throw a pity party for this holidaymaker who clearly could not cut the electronic umbilical cord to her office and have a REAL holiday.

Except for two reasons. The first is that she was clearly having a great time. She was as tuned into the rhythms and themes coming through her tiny phone as 15 years ago kids on the same beach would have been tuned into the rap coming from the ghetto-blasters on their shoulders.

The second reason to withhold sympathy from this woman is that she personifies a significant trend: the electronic abolition of the summer holiday.

Years ago, staying in touch with home never mind office during an overseas holiday required carefully co-ordinated phone calls from a hotel. Holidaymakers exchanged stories of how they'd been overcharged for three minute conversations.

TV and radio tended to be only in the language of the host country. I remember, in those years, my husband listening to an Italian radio station in the belief that his knowledge of Latin would allow him to understand the news bulletin. He muttered that he thought the Pope might have died.

"The Pope died last month," I pointed out.

"Yeah, but I think the new one has died, now," he said, and was right.

Most hotels in Europe now carry channels in English. In addition, many Irish holidaymakers carry their laptops with them and because of the proliferation of electronic 'hot spots' can access email and news websites in coffee shops and airports at the drop of a keystroke.

Not only does this give the traveller international news (the reports of yesterday's air-crash in Greece were available within an hour of the plane going down) but it allows people overseas to be, if anything, MORE on top of what's happening at home than are the locals.

The same applies to GSM phones. Americans say they can tell Irish tourists from others, these days, at a glance.

The Irish are the ones who walk around with their phones held out in front of them, thumbs madly lashing at the numbers. Americans (who don't do much texting) maintain that the Irish are more hooked on texting, and identifiable thereby, than any other nation in the world.

All of which leads to the kind of thing that happened to my boss, when he got a text from a hassled client and phoned her within seconds of the arrival of the message. She noticed the ambient noise around his voice.

"There's great craic going on in the background," she said.

"You in a pub?"

"No, I'm having lunch with my family at a beach café in Sicily," came the answer.

She was mortified, because the received wisdom is that holidays are sacrosanct: interrupting them by even a short phonecall about domestic issues will destroy their recuperative function as badly as halting antibiotics as soon as the septic throat feels better.

This precious myth of restorative isolation with one's family actually runs counter to a century of data. Take, for example, the memories of Mike Royko's son. Mike Royko wrote the definitive book about Mayor Daley and when he made a bit of money from that publication, took his family to Europe.

"If my mother stopped to talk to a sidewalk vendor or somebody who made scarves, my father would mutter, 'God damn it, we have to go,'" David Royko, one of the two boys, remembers.

"He had something else he wanted us to see even if we didn't want to see it. He had planned to see everything in Europe that was significant for 2,000 years and he wanted to do it in 30 days."

THAT about sums up the experience of generations who experienced true family holidays divorced from the concerns of home and didn't enjoy them that much.

Yet, today, holidaymakers who stay in contact with the office are regarded as a sorry bunch who lack the ability to get out of harness and really LIVE.

Significantly, this is not the case in America, where long holidays are rare.

According to David Brooks's On Paradise Drive, published last year, the average American works 350 hours a year nearly 10 weeks longer than the average European.

"For the first time in history, " Brooks observes, "people at the top of the income ladder work longer hours than people at the bottom. Over the past 20 years, the proportion of American managers and professionals who work over 50 hours a week has increased by a third."

Managers and professionals, the very people who, at least in theory, have control over the number of hours they work, are choosing to work longer than they have to, and much longer than people in other times and places who had no choice about it.

"If we compare our employment patterns with the workday of a hunter-gatherer in the Peruvian forests (three to four hours), the average work week in pre-revolutionary France (four days), or the annual number of work-free days in fourth-century Rome (175), we seem a very hard-driven lot," says anthropologist Margaret Visser.

Irish people, particularly those who buy into the idea of work/life balance, are self-conscious about choosing to work longer hours, but they're doing it, nonetheless, and staying in constant contact with the office even when they're on annual leave.

They're doing so in the teeth of reproving glances and comments about workaholics shortening their lifespans.

('Workaholic' is the term of abuse applied to people who love their work by people who hate their work.) It may not be cause-and-effect, but the fact is that the people educated, wealthy and absorbed by their work who live longest tend also to be those who take laptops and mobile phones on holiday.

Work is where we spend the bulk of our life and where we weave essential strands of personal identity and self-worth. Why shouldn't we take it with us to the sun?