I hadn’t intended to go on a ‘staycation’ this summer. Quite the contrary, I’d booked a family holiday to Norway. Last August, I made the mistake of renting a villa in Majorca and it was so hot it was impossible to do anything, including sleep. So this year I insisted on going north and arranged to borrow a log cabin near Trondheim. The two oldest children were so unimpressed – they loved the nightlife in Majorca – that they refused to come, which was fine by me. The flights were £200 each way and it meant we only had to rent a Fiat Uno instead of a six-seater. One of the legacies of having been a journalist for 40 years is that I’ve done a lot of travel pieces and find it painful to pay for foreign trips out of my own pocket.
We’ve been go-karting, gone on a speedboat ride, walked to Walton-on-Thames
Then, 24 hours before our flight was due to depart, Caroline made a terrible discovery: Fred and Charlie’s passports had expired. We were tempted to go anyway, but the risk of leaving all four children behind is that they’d have a ‘Facebook’ party, i.e., advertise the fact that they’re having a party on social media and then be powerless to stop 1,000 teenagers streaming through the front door, laying waste to our home like locusts.
Indeed, Sasha has form in this respect, having organised a secret ‘rave’ at our house when she was 14, complete with DJs and bouncers. We were planning to leave her home alone, but found out about it just in time when a mother called wanting to know when to pick her daughter up ‘from the party’.
Caroline was determined to make the best of our cock-up and decided we should behave as if we were on holiday anyway. She quickly set about arranging various excursions and activities, deaf to my pleas that we’d already used up our annual holiday budget. I pointed out that Norwegian Air wouldn’t refund the flights and that we still had to pay half the rental car fee. ‘Oh do shut up, misery guts,’ she said.
So in the past week we’ve been go-karting, walked along the towpath from Hampton Court to Walton-on-Thames, had lunch in Borough Market, gone on a speedboat ride and completed a five-mile dog walk that ended with lunch at a restaurant billed as a cheaper version of the River Café, where a plate of pasta only cost £50 instead of the usual £75. All of which was actually quite fun.
The icing on the cake was a trip to Sheffield last Saturday. This time it was just Charlie and me, and we watched QPR come back from a two-nil deficit at Bramall Lane to finish the game two-all. For Rangers fans, that’s what we call a result.
One thing that made the staycation endurable was the thought of all those families struggling to cope with the logistical nightmare of travelling anywhere these days. Driving to Gatwick or Heathrow is out of the question, so congested are the roads, which means having to rely on England’s crumbling rail network. In my experience, about one in three trains is cancelled, either because of strikes or ‘engineering works’ on the line. And when you finally get to the airport there’s no guarantee your plane will take off, certainly not on time. Caroline and I tried to catch a flight from Luton to Inverness last month to spend the weekend in Scotland, and got as far as the departure lounge when our easyJet flight was cancelled because the crew calculated that if they undertook the journey, they’d be 15 minutes over their allotted shift time. I’m not making that up.
There’s also the risk that the natives at your destination will be distinctly unfriendly. I thought Majorca was bad last year, but in addition to being just as sweltering this summer, you have the added delight of protests by local people unhappy about the number of visitors each year. I can see their point. Westminster is unbearable in August thanks to all the tourists taking selfies in front of Big Ben. There was something delightful about walking along a deserted Thames towpath on a Tuesday morning, knowing that better-organised families than us were having to fight their way through hordes of holiday–makers in 40°c heat. Even getting a table at the ‘cut-price’ River Café was easy, possibly because London’s super-rich are all in the South of France.
I still want to go to Norway and at the end of the week I suggested we go next year instead. This time, three of our four children objected. I immediately started weighing up the benefits (lower cost) against the risks (Facebook party). If the worse comes to the worst, we can always go on another staycation.
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