No salt and pepper, no spices, not enough loo roll – welcome to your holiday cottage
“Welcome basket”. It sounds so nice, doesn’t it? So … welcoming. Driving up the M1 to the holiday cottage you booked online, you picture the delights that await you, and smile inwardly even as the sign ahead says: “Queue after the next junction.” You know already there’ll be a lemon drizzle cake from “our local farm shop” (ie a factory in Derby). Also, a jar of marmalade, a bottle of apple juice and a loaf of bread. There always is. But everything else – ginger snaps? Black pudding? A Peking duck? – is still, at this point, subject to the kind of moderately wild imagining that has you pushing your foot down just a little harder on the accelerator.
What you’re forgetting, of course, is that welcome baskets are not, in fact, even remotely welcoming. They are passive-aggressive acts, timed to remind you of both your own desperation (“How much did we pay for this, again?”) and of the fact that a “self-catering holiday” is basically a contradiction in terms (true in any year, but never more brutally so than in 2021). The first rule of the welcome basket – congratulations, you’ve arrived! – is that it will not be a basket at all, but a cardboard box or a plastic bag. The second rule is that, though the house is for four people, it will invariably contain only two, or six, of everything: two yoghurts, two scones, six sausages. (You do the maths, as they say.) The welcome basket’s essential message is: please don’t imagine for a minute that you’re going to be able to get away without visiting Tesco tomorrow.
Soon it’ll be time to start packing up. To leave, or not to leave, the untouched jar of marmalade: that is the question
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