We all have our routines – some more than others.

I was on holidays earlier in the year and, like most of us in that situation, I spent a lot of time doing nothing. Funnily enough, the world didn’t stop spinning. That got me thinking about how much of what we do is really necessary and how much is done out of habit or just simply because it has become part of our routine.

We love our routines and we all have them. They provide us with a certain security and it’s comforting to know what’s going to happen next so we can prepare for it. The downside is that we can also become too dependent on routine and when something upsets it, we can be thrown into a panic.

There are people who go for a pint on a certain day, at the same time to the same pub. Some cut the grass on the same day in the week and they follow a certain pattern with the lawn mower to make sure they get same design on the grass. Others get the same daily paper every morning and sit in their favourite chair, reading it from cover to cover. I will confess to being one of those and upsetting that would be worse than inflicting a dose of piles on me.

Routine is necessary. We are introduced into a routine when we are very young for feeding and sleeping purposes. As we get older we organise ourselves in terms of getting out of bed in the morning for school and work because we need to be organised. Later, when we have kids of our own, we need to be even more organised to cope with all that is involved in caring for their needs and a routine is essential for everything to run a bit more smoothly.

That’s the way it is. If you interrupt our routine, we are very put out. When the clock changes in spring and autumn we are upset for a small while. Our routine is out of kilter because we keep thinking of the old time instead of just accepting the change and getting on with it.

For some, going abroad for a holiday is a major upset in their routine and to ease the pain they must bring certain food with them. Things like tea, sausages, rashers, butter must go in the suitcase because they would not be able to survive without them. You’d swear that no other country in the world had a supermarket or drank tea.

When they arrive, the first thing they have to find is the Irish bar. They’re happy once they locate it and then they won’t go anywhere else. They make a new routine for themselves because that’s the way they like it. Having to drink a local beer in the company of strangers speaking with a funny accent would be just too much.

Before my father died, I brought him to Krakow in Poland. He was an avid photographer all his life and his other passion was reading about WWII. He read volumes on the subject and he was fascinated with some of the photos of that time.

One in particular, was a picture of a sentry tower near the entrance to Auschwitz concentration camp that was taken by someone standing on the railway line inside the camp looking back at the tower.

I figured that we could re-create that photo and that’s what we set out to do. Sadly, while we both had cameras, I used his one to photograph him with this tower in the background but I can’t find the photograph since. But in any event, it doesn’t really matter because what’s important is that he got a huge kick out of it at the time. And that was the object of the exercise.

I was surprised by a few things on that trip but one thing really caught me off guard. I was always used to my father being a strong, confident, self- assured man but when we arrived in Cork Airport to begin our journey, I found that he seemed to be completely lost. He sat to one side and waited until I had checked us in and then he just stuck close by and did what I did.

It was the same thing when we got to Poland, he stood back and waited for me to do whatever needed to be done. This was a little strange for me and it threw me a bit. But when I thought about it, it made complete sense.

His comfort zone was getting smaller and smaller as he got older. He confined himself to driving locally and anywhere beyond his home town was foreign soil. He had a routine and he loved it and now, on this little adventure, he was completely out of it.

By the time we went to Poland, he was in his late seventies and even though I didn’t know it at the time, he was suffering from cancer. I don’t imagine that he ever ventured beyond the UK in his lifetime so at his age, to be making this journey to a place he was familiar with only through books, must have been a big deal. More especially, given his age and that he wasn’t fully fit.

In any event, he enjoyed his trip and the experience of visiting Auschwitz meant a lot to him. It was the last outing we had together. He died not too long after that and he left us in the same way that he had lived his life, with no fuss or drama just quietly slipping away.

For some, routine is a crutch and it provides comfort. It takes away the fear of not knowing what’s going to happen next. And there’s nothing wrong with that.