I haven’t been on holiday this summer, but don’t start tuning the tiny violins. I derive an unusual satisfaction from working when others aren’t (burning martyr is my preferred summer fragrance) and I don’t like change, or strange pillows. Plus, what would Susan, the pigeon who lives on our roof, and my bounteous crop of five unripe tomatoes do without me?
A summer holiday just doesn’t appeal. Is that weird? It feels as if the climate crisis is killing the notion of summer as something to look forward to and holiday hotspots (literally) are losing their lustre, with Greek islands reaching fatal temperatures and Sicily stricken with catastrophic drought.
Getting there is horrible, too. Train travel should be bliss, but privatisation and other people have put paid to that. Cars mean having to tetchily navigate tailbacks as Sabrina Carpenter tunes bore into your brain, or crying as your navigation app redirects you – and every other road user – along a dirt track, where local people, who had never seen a stranger until Waze was invented, wave pitchforks at you. You have to scour the shelves of the Welcome Break for anything that wouldn’t give Tim Spector an aneurysm and pee in places that will be for ever seared on your psyche. Airports are canonical purgatory and aeroplanes are an insanitary hell, tainted by flygskam (the Swedish anti-flight movement). After a couple of hours of any travel, I am ready to move into a self-dug burrow that I heat with my own waste and live off lichen.
Then, when you get to your destination, the local people would rather you hadn’t. Overtourism makes their lives hell and renders the experience travellers are seeking impossible.
Mostly, though, I don’t have to go on summer holidays because other people do and social media lets me go with them. I have been vacationing vicariously this year and I think I like it better. I am spared the agony of choosing my own singular, expensive, high-stakes holiday, and instead dip into a smorgasbord of other people’s for nothing – an upbeat, stress-free, colour-saturated and endlessly stimulating parade of infinity pools, dolphins and local delicacies.
I know that TikTok in particular is contributing to the problem of overtourism, sending hundreds of people to block the street outside some overwhelmed sandwich vendor, harass wildlife or degrade a beauty spot, but it doesn’t make me want to go to these places. The secondhand experience provides sufficient gratification without the infected mosquito bites, Airbnbs hotter than the core of the sun and clueless comparisons of five near-identical menus while my blood sugar plummets. I don’t even crave most of what I see: “That looks disgusting,” I sometimes find myself whispering, pleasurably, as I watch a TikToker pantomiming ecstasy eating a beef bourguignon croissant burger in the street, while exasperated local people walk past tutting.
I have vicariously experienced my sons’ holidays, too (though they are less forthcoming with the visuals, or words, or anything), and while they didn’t look disgusting, I enjoyed parsing a laconic account of some dangerous-sounding outing or travel near-miss far more than doing that stuff. I love seeing their generation taking flight, living their best holiday lives after their wings were so comprehensively clipped by Covid. Admittedly, I was unable to stop myself providing heavily hyperlinked, faux-casual lists of suggestions for their destinations, then had to bite my tongue when they were ignored. What do you mean you went to Paris and didn’t get to the Place des Vosges? You didn’t try any of the 18 bakeries I suggested?
But vacation voyeurs can’t be choosers and maybe it is good that September is here, because I think it may be time to step back. My thumbs ache and my brain is smoothed to the consistency of a viral cotton candy soft-serve ice-cream from all the listless scrolling under grey Yorkshire skies (plus Carpenter has wormed her way inside my skull, even though I haven’t gone further than a drop-off at Manchester airport). Maybe I need a break. A … what are those things called? It will come to me.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
