Holidays? I'd rather stay at home

Spring hasn’t yet sprung but already I’m being bombarded with the intricate details of people’s holiday plans.

Most of my girlfriends are obsessed with discussing where they’re going to fry their bodies to a tangerine-hued crisp come July, while links to “bargain breaks” are being e-mailed to me on an hourly basis.

Call me strange but I just don’t get the whole holiday thing – as far as I’m concerned there are plenty more pleasurable things to do with my free time than globetrot. I suppose I could lay the blame for this apathy with my parents. As a child I spent every last week of July and the first week of August in some back-of-beyond Devon field with only a standpipe and the occasional cow for company.

The on-site entertainment consisted of watching my dad struggle to erect our awning before it blew away and suppressing laughter as late-rising fellow campers hot-footed it across the grass in pursuit of the departing milk van. The lap of luxury it was not.

We had a VW camper van, the kind that’s now coveted by tousle-haired youngsters who descend, surf board on roof, on places such as Newquay in the delusional belief they’re at the cutting edge of holiday making.

Much to my chagrin, having the camper van meant we were not restricted as to when we went away; weekends would be spent at various locations on the south coast, a journey that would follow the same pattern with my parents arguing over my mother’s inability to read a map, my dad vowing it was the last time we went away (if only), while I sat on the sofa seat in the back, trying not to be sick.

The strains of Johnny Cash or Marty Robbins cassettes played on a loop were also an omnipresent feature, although those country and western tapes are probably my fondest memories of our breaks. After 10 or so years of hearing them on repeat I can to this day break into a word perfect I Walk The Line but it’s a high price to pay for having spent my formative years pootling down remote country lanes in an emerald green van with a pop-up roof.

These days I have a little more control over my holiday destinations. Some might think I should be making up for my wasted youth by jetting off to exotic locations but I just don’t want to. And on the occasions I do give in and go away, after three days I am pining for home.

Washing, for example, causes me great concern when away. I suspect this is a left over neurosis from the spider-infested, muddy footprint-stained campsite showers of yore. Today, even in the swishest of hotels or the most modern of campsites, I never feel really clean and that first homecoming shower is pure, unadulterated bliss.

And I am not alone in my vacation phobia. “My limit anywhere strange is three days and then I want to go home,” agrees my friend Maureen. “I don’t care how lovely it is. I like to be near my dogs and my computer.”

Another friend – and a seasoned traveller at that – says: “I think a lot of people come home and rave to their friends about what a great holiday they’ve had when really they got tummy bugs, hated the food, got bored with the tours and longed for their own bed.”

How I agree. Being vegetarian, I find eating abroad difficult to say the least. I was once served a plate full of peas as the veggie main course in a Pyrenean village restaurant. And as for noisy neighbours, I am still haunted by the shrieks of a toddler who voiced his discontent from 10pm to 7am in a hotel in Lyon.

“What really bugs me,” says my friend Simon, who is not averse to sunning his body in the Med, “is the run up to going away – all the organisation and shopping for stuff. It’s like preparing to move house but just for the sake of one or two weeks.”

I wonder why people put themselves through it. I honestly would rather be at home, catching up on DIY or sorting out my garden. It beats getting sunburnt, bitten and overdrawn abroad. The whole idea of sweating it out on a crowded beach or lying around a hotel swimming pool for 14 days really does fill me with horror.

But at 34 should I really be blaming my folks for these holiday hang-ups? Now in their 70s, they no longer go away. My mother would like to but my father made a startling confession several years ago – he doesn’t like holidays. Never has done. If only he had spoken up 25 years earlier.

*********************************************************************************

BACK TO EXPRESS YOURSELF FOR MORE TOP FEATURES!

*********************************************************************************