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.
Meanwhile, I appear to be turning into a person I do not recognise. As I write, it would be foolhardy to try to book a holiday abroad, and Britain is like Bethlehem at census time. A friend who lives in the Lake District tells me that most hotels have no availability whatsoever until next spring; self-catering visitors hoping for dinner out pretty quickly realise they’ll just have to make do with something nice from Booths heated up in the unpredictable ovens of their rental cottages. What to do with the rest of the summer? The mind turns, slowly and grumpily, to days out and, inevitably, to picnics. Yesterday, to my horror, I spent half an hour – it might even have been more – browsing tartan blankets online. It seems likely that I’m not, after all, going to end my days without owning a cooler box.
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