Swerving the semantic minefield surrounding the double meaning of the word “staycation”, I can assert with confidence that most of us will be having one (a holiday at home) or the other (a holiday in the UK) or both this year.
Despite “vaccine passport” rumours, most of us have abandoned the idea of escaping Plague Variant Island for now: a survey by Best Western found that 90% of respondents felt “safer” holidaying in Britain this summer. It shows: self-catering sites are overwhelmed, Cornwall will be erecting a giant “no vacancies” sign from June to September and campsite bookings have been stratospheric for months, despite camping being far worse than staying at home (fight me). Center Parcs is charging more than £7,000 a week for a four-bedroom “exclusive lodge” in Bedfordshire in August, approximately what you would have to pay me to go to Center Parcs again.
I know, because I am one of the people who – having looked at the desperate pathos of TV tour operator ads (“Beaches and cocktails still exist! Dare to dream!”), case rates and (momentarily, shuddering) at the dishevelled PM, cosplay lab coat askew, hamming it up with a pipette for a cursed photo op – sighed and tried to book a UK break. Is this my ideal scenario? Absolutely not. My dream holiday, now and always, involves examining the desiccated body or body-part of a different saint in a different dark Italian church with inhospitable opening hours and spending the time between relic viewings comparing gelaterias. Alone.
Instead, I spent much of last week juggling multiple Airbnb windows and a map of Scotland as my husband shouted possibly nonexistent dates and mispronounced place names. He wants to take our son – who leaves the house so little at the moment that his complexion reminds me of those bioluminescent deep-sea fish – diving, but the dive site is on an island the size of an oatcake, served by a ferry whose schedule is best described as whimsical. The surrounding coastline turns out to be wildly popular with, I don’t know, midge fetishists, perhaps? As a result, our holiday options are a handful of forbidding cottages whose aesthetic is somewhat “murdery”, and more Taggart murder than the wholesome Highland bobby Hamish Macbeth. None look likely to contain a mug larger than a thimble or wifi. What will I, a non-diver, even do? Perhaps, in homage to numerous miserable teenage holidays spent in similar places (my parents were midge fetishists), I could walk to the nearest phone box, have an existential crisis, then walk back.
It might not even come to that. A week in the Highland murder mist seems to cost more than a month in the Maldives (though mud baths and midge facials are complimentary) and the diving logistics are so mind-meltingly complex that so far, we have achieved nothing.
Should we even bother? Our collective expectations of fun have been recalibrated downwards so radically that perhaps we don’t need a proper holiday this year. I say that because I’m writing this from another person’s house. It’s legit (doctor’s orders), but oh, the heady, illicit thrill of being somewhere – anywhere – else. I can see a strange dog in the street, the dishwasher makes an unfamiliar noise and there are walls I have never stared at before!
Rather than marching our variants around the country this summer, wouldn’t it be safer – and, importantly, just as exciting – to simply house-swap? I’m addicted to the Window Swap website, where you click to look out of someone else’s window (a New York construction site, a lakeside hammock in Georgia and a cat’s bum in Melbourne were my last three); this would be less exotic, but better.
Because we don’t need to go far to get the change of scene we crave. Deprived of other people and the fascinating minutiae of their lives for so long, a different bin schedule or unorthodox cutlery drawer would do it for me. With a bit of Dettol, open windows and some creative repurposing of neighbourhood chat groups, maybe we could all have the holiday of a lifetime right here.
