Sun-soaked, fun-filled group holidays are a lovely idea, in theory – but all too often the habits, husbands and hangovers of friends (even good ones) can turn a two-week idyll into an endurance test. Approach with caution, says Hilary Fannin
There are activities that one can, and probably should, enjoy alone. The penitential three-mile jog (okay, let’s be honest, crawl) after a weekend of cut-price Chardonnay and chicken korma is generally a pleasure that should be enjoyed solo. The gym is far more effective alone, if not half as much fun (who do you go for coffee and carrot cake with afterwards?), and most art can be imbibed single-handedly. You can weep in the dark at sentimental tripe in your local multiplex, or snigger with impunity up your carefully chosen sleeve in any number of high art establishments around town. Yet when it comes to holidays, those brief intervals of freedom in a long cold year of routine and responsibility, many of us, rather than grabbing the chance to remove ourselves from the turmoil of our domestic lives – let alone other people’s domestic lives (not to mention their children and dogs and marriages, and strange bedtime rituals and dietary idiosyncrasies) – become alarmingly, incautiously, communal.
The holiday season is here, snapping at our ankles like cold wavelets on an Atlantic shore. And yes, storm clouds may be gathering and a north-easterly gale might be shredding the hedgerows, but hell, the calendar says July, so it’s time to squeeze our milk-white thighs into a pair of ugly shorts and load up the family hatchback for a shared holiday with our equally injudicious, and invariably pallid, friends and relations.
I have witnessed the most misanthropic among us slavering on the milk of human optimism, along with the sunscreen, when the very word “holiday” is mentioned. “It will be fantastic!” we bray. “The kids will play together, we’ll save a fortune on the rental bill, we can lie around on our plastic steamers with our embarrassing novels and not move a sunburnt muscle until it’s time to stoke the barbecue and accept that cold beer that your brother/ friend/former badminton partner/mother of little Johnny at the school gate has just fished out of the cooler for you. Eh ... well ... no, not quite. Unless you’ve done your homework about your travelling companions, shared holidays can become a miasma of simmering tensions and dampened expectations.
It’s just possible that encroaching flood plains, freezing water pipes and three years of wet, wet, wet summers have chemically altered our Christ-what-am-I-thinking-get-a-grip mechanisms. The reality is that while a lovely group getaway might sound swell when the plan is being hatched – on a wet Tuesday in February, huddled under your friend’s umbrella, while waiting for your children to be extruded from their educational establishments – the reality can be entirely different.
The domestic arena, at home or abroad, especially when it’s somebody else’s domestic arena (one that looked a lot sunnier and bigger in the brochure), can be a pretty fraught place. It’s day five, the bath is full of sand, wellingtons are mouldering in the living room, the television is in Welsh, and you haven’t slept for four nights as your friend’s Mussolini-like toddler, whom she insists on calling “Pussy-willow”, has been roaring her over-indulged head off since you arrived, because they forgot to pack her favourite sucky-bunny.
Kitchens are undoubtedly the bullring of the shared domestic arena. The combination of lousy little holiday-let ovens, plastic wine glasses, not enough saucepans, monsoons outside the window and other people’s pint-sized fussy eaters telling you they don’t like it when their sausages are actually touching their beans can, unsurprisingly, be enough to send one over the edge.
YOU CAN READ THE REST OF THIS STORY IN THE JULY ISSUE OF THE GLOSS MAGAZINE, OUT NOW.
