Forget travelling – take a “real” staycation
Earlier this year, the Spectator published an article headlined “The snobbery of ‘staycations’” in which the journalist Lara King argued that the term “staycation” had mutated into “a misnomer that is at best confusing, and at worst contradictory”.
The term, she wrote, should refer to staying at home, rather than travelling domestically: “Where’s the logic in describing a journey of 650 miles from London to the Highlands, crossing a border, as a staycation? Paris is half the distance – would a trip across the Channel be a staycation too?”
To expect to spend your annual leave holidaying abroad is a huge privilege and as King points out, the need for a specific word to describe holidaying in the UK “suggests you’ve only ever holidayed abroad and assume that everyone else has, too.” But the stereotype of the “Brit abroad” wasn’t plucked from thin air; according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), before Covid, UK residents consistently made more trips abroad than foreign residents made to Britain. In 2020, however, Brits made 96 per cent fewer trips abroad than in the corresponding period in the previous year. Staycations, or holidaying in Britain, quickly became our dreaded “new normal”.
Throughout the pandemic, I have heard countless people say that working from home means they don’t need a break, or that they would rather store up holiday for when international travel is open again. Work from home burnout might be more insidious but with the added stresses of the pandemic, it is hard to believe anyone doesn’t need a break. So, last week, I took my first significant chunk of annual leave in 2021, leaving everyone else to fight over Airbnbs in Cornwall and the Cotswolds, choosing a real staycation in London instead.
Despite the absence of tourists, the relative isolation of the last year or so has made London feel increasingly crowded as things open up. A staycation provides the gift of time to enjoy galleries, the gym and long and leisurely lunches without throngs of people or the stress of returning to work.
I had a list of boring chores I had assumed a staycation would leave me some time to attend to; fix my bike, take my camera to a repair shop and give the house an overdue spring clean, but my to-do list was quickly abandoned. I set out to be a tourist in my own city instead, taking a long Uber boat down the river instead of the tube, enjoying barbecues whilst watching the football, sleeping too little and then too much and ending the week feeling just as rested as a holiday to France or Spain might have left me. And there wasn’t a frazzling rush to the airport or exhausting plane journey to jolt me back to reality at the end of it.
Staycationing and living in London is, however, a double-edged sword; on the one hand, how fortunate to live in a capital city with endless things to do, places to go and people to see. On the other, the joke that you only have to breathe in London to empty your bank account is well-founded in fact. But rediscovering your neighbourhood after months of lockdowns and contributing to local businesses is good for the economy, and a lot of fun, wherever you live.
The future of travel is a spiky subject, compounded by grey skies and rain clouds in the middle of June. But whilst the government figures out its unpredictable traffic light system and we continue to vaccinate the nation, take a week off and have a “real” staycation. You might miss the thrills of a hotel buffet breakfast, the consistency of the Mediterranean sun and the impulse to travel after a year and a half of cabin fever is understandable, but the staycation carries benefits of its own. There is something necessary in the creation of memories not associated with work, self-isolation or the anxiety of a pandemic within the home. Divorcing the bedroom from the office and reclaiming our homes as places of relaxation, entertainment and leisure, even just for a week, will do us all a world of good.