Holidays abroad are tricky. The UK is fully booked. There’s only one thing for it – buy a tartan rug and wicker basket
Out in the world, everything is subtly altered. It’s as if I’m wearing glasses that have the wrong prescription. At a seaside hotel for the weekend, I found leaves in the pool; there they floated disconsolately, awaiting a net-wielding person who was plainly never going to arrive, the staff shortages of which we’ve already heard quite a lot now obvious pretty much everywhere one goes. On a terrace for lunch, there were more (terrifyingly aggressive) seagulls than waiters; in the evening, I watched a lone barman struggling to fix cocktails for at least a dozen guests who sat waiting, unmasked but still strangely blank-faced, on sofas that were dotted around the room like distant islands in a sea of carpet. “Lara!” he called, at one point. “Lara!” Alas, Lara did not appear, and nor did some people’s gin and tonics.
In my fevered imagination, it’s as if I’m hosting an Edwardian shooting party, minus the guns and the dead birds
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