O nce again summer is here and I have forgotten to book a holiday. I don’t know how you lot do it, with your diaries and your dates, and your savings, and your organising the cat, and your knowing what you want, before you want it. It’s not that I don’t want it enough.
I want it more than enough. My internal holiday clock begins ticking in the barren dead of winter, a fantasy of beaches and freshly caught fish, but as the clock continues, the rest of me remains static, frozen in indecision and lack of imagination. This, I realise now, must be when the rest of you are booking your time off work, scrolling your houses to rent near the sea, negotiating which group of your friends you can live with for a week without upturning the table of ancient relationships, negotiating which of your friends’ children you can live with for a week without.
.. best not say.
Good for you. Good for you. As I scrabble around now for somewhere to take my family during the school holidays, I find myself drawn time and again to something online called the Ultimate Mystery Holiday.
Perhaps you have seen it, have similarly heard its quiet knock on your pre-sleep dreams, have opened the door just a crack, only to find its mysteries haunting your waking dreams, too. The Ultimate Mystery Holiday is an option on a popular voucher site where, alongside the compost bins and cream teas, you can buy “an Ultimate Mystery Getaway from £99pp.” It goes on, “Holidays include Bali, Mexico, New York, th.
