It's the end of the staycation, and I feel fine

© Simon Poulter

There was no 4am start this year. No pre-dawn gathering of grumpy teenagers for the drive to Gatwick. There was no glorious arrival, either, as the hot sun first hits the face as you walk down the plane’s steps on your way into the arrivals hall and, ideally, collection of your baggage. No, this year there was the briefest of journeys down to the south coast, a 45-minute ferry crossing, followed by a glorious week on the Isle of Wight. This was followed by a second week at home in which I had my hair cut, maxed out the credit card at a designer outlet shopping centre, sat in the garden a bit, went to the pub for lunch, walked down the high street for coffee, celebrated my girlfriend’s birthday at a swanky London hotel, came home and sweated in the garden a bit more. And I feel brilliant. Most relaxed I’ve felt in, well, months.

I’ve got to admit, this year’s enforced staycation has benefited from glorious weather. While on the Isle of Wight there was a point where the self-reassuring “well, this could easily be the Mediterranean” started to become a cliché. But the truth is, it was. And all with shopping trips to Marks & Spencer without the customary adolescent sniggering at foreign brands with ‘funny’ names. Even the apartment we rented - on spec - overlooking Cowes harbour contributed to a blissful state of escape for all of us. No rush in the morning to get to some amusement on time, nowhere on the island more than an hour away, and still back in time for dinner indoors or the four-minute walk into town.

For those who holiday on these shores every year, quite happily and without any sense of injustice, I must sound like a right metropolitan knobhead. But for all my adult life, and that of my partner (and, indeed, her children), holidays have been about properly getting away - as far away as jet travel will accommodate. The summer escape has been exactly that - an opportunity to see somewhere else, to experience somewhere else, to be somewhere else. But this summer, given COVID-19, there was no way that a) we weren’t going to have a break and b) we weren’t going to any of the usual destinations, with their azure seas, sandy beaches, hotel swimming pools, comedy waiters pedalling their well-worn shtick every night - and the risk of not getting back, or getting back and spending the next 14 days in quarantine.

I don’t wish, either, to sound too revelatory. Plenty of middle class Londoners descend every year on Falmouth, Newquay, Salcombe and all the other quaint West Country destinations, where the locals detest these so-called “grockles” while theoretically coining in their dosh. The staycation is nothing new. All of my childhood holidays until the age of 13 were exclusively in either Wales or the West Country, and most, if not all, involved mostly wearing cagoules and other forms of wet weather protection. Even the summer of 1976, when the rest of Britain turned a dusty brown, we managed to stay in a mid-Wales self-catering cottage where it stair-rodded down. Every. Single. Day. Our staycation this year has been blessed by the weather. I’m sure, in our well-appointed apartment, we would have remained stoic had it have poured every day, but luckily we didn’t need to be. Ditto this last week, which has managed to conclude with the second consecutive hottest-day-of-the-year on a Friday, too. But enough gloating.

Putting money into the coffers of clearly struggling restaurants has been an act of mutually convenient benevolence. The virus has changed the way places like these do business (woe betide anyone not owning a smartphone when they go out now, as almost everywhere seems to operate menus and ordering systems called up via downloadable apps or QR-code links). Which is why the lurid tabloid headlines of overflowing beaches swarming with human flotsam seems at odds with the reality elsewhere. Nowhere we’ve been over the last couple of weeks has exactly been heaving. On the Isle of Wight, the best beaches were popular, but never uncomfortably so. Perhaps, though, it’s not surprising. We took the plunge and booked our week in order to ensure we had some semblance of getting away. Others have been understandably less confident. Few places we went on the island were anywhere close to what I was expecting for the end of July, which is a worry as tourism contributes nearly half a billion pounds to the local economy, and provides employment to 16 per cent of the population. Cornwall - somewhere I haven’t been on holiday since a disastrous childhood family trip, staying in an old miner’s cottage in the delightfully-named Delabole, which sprang a leak halfway through our fortnight forcing us to abandon ship a week early - has become de rigueur for posh urbanites. “Chelsea-on-Sea”, screamed hysterical headlines last week after the streets of places like Newquay appearing to be overflowing with Tarquins, Camillas and their Tobys and Lucys. David Cameron is probably to blame (though not just for Cornish tourism...). Like the Isle of Wight, the New Forest, the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales, et al, tourism accounts for a lot of the economy in Cornwall, too. £1.5 billion last year, the result of 4.5 million visitors (half the population of London or almost twice that of Birmingham, for comparison). And, yet, while the headlines might suggest carnage, the reality - as we found on the Isle of Wight - is somewhat different, as establishments have to limit their opening hours, bring in enforced distancing and COVID-compliant hygiene measures.

A recent piece in the Financial Times by columnist Sebastian Payne revealed that some places he visited in Cornish resorts can’t actually afford to reopen with the new rules. “Plus,” one shop owner in Polperro stated, “we all know there is probably another lockdown coming later this year so what’s the point of reopening to close again?”. I mention this simply because of our admittedly smug indifference to ‘FOGO’, fear of going out. OK, wearing a mask in hot weather is a pain, but if that’s the only hardship getting in the way of having a relaxing couple of weeks off, then what’s the problem? I know it’s not as simple as that, but over the last couple of weeks we’ve enjoyed a glimpse, maybe, of what a normal holiday should be like, but not once did we feel hard-done-by. Actually (and don’t tell my other half), I actually enjoyed seeing the English countryside, even the one day when it was cool and drizzly. Maybe it’s because I needed a holiday after five months of lockdown (one in which I was also coping with a new job and a new diagnosis of diabetes), but I have enjoyed the last two weeks probably more than many of my more expansive holidays over the last 30 years or so. Yes, exotic is nice, but sometimes something that, at first, might appear prosaic, can turn out to be just what you want from a holiday: a simple pleasure.