What does your holiday destination say about you?
The Canadian lakes
You’ve been going for years, ignoring the raised eyebrows from all the people who thought it was so dull and just made ‘aroond and aboot’ jokes. ‘Not exactly rock’n’roll,’ they’d say. Ha. Now you find you are bedded into the coolest spot on earth. ‘Did you meet Justin?’ they’ll ask. ‘Can we come with you next year?’ Who knew you were a trendsetter? You certainly didn’t.
North Wales
(Or to be specific, caravanning in North Wales.) You are always the right side of vintage, a little bit grubby and yet interesting. You can whip up a MasterChef meal on a single-burner thingy and have never eaten a packet of digestives for dinner. There are always duck feathers in your hair from all that wild swimming. In fact you are a bit damp all the time, but you quite enjoy the chafing. Caravans are like Viagra for you – you’ll return exhausted and possibly pregnant. Again. You may call the child Kestrel.
Los Angeles
Time to just hang out and pretend this is your life. Hire a bit of a cool car. Juice a lot on Venice Beach. Allow your inflection to rise gently at the end of sentences, as in, ‘I just really feel myself here?’ Go for hikes (walks) in the Hollywood Hills and faintly wonder if you’ll be discovered and have to relocate to California to fulfil your destiny. You wear athleisure all day (‘Everyone in LA is half on holiday and half exercising at all times?’) and return with dodgy film-industry gossip you’ve got from waiters. You feel fat the whole time.
South of France
You are violently retro. But not too retro to go inland to a charming village with a market and no breeze and terrible mosquitoes and a villa with damp and vicious locals and blocked loos. You decide to base your novel on this trip to make yourself feel better and fling open your laptop, but only get as far as emailing a divorce lawyer.
Cornwall
You’ve been going to Rock/Padstow/St Ives for, like, ever. You swear blind that it only takes three hours and you’ve never been stuck in a traffic jam on the A303 for a whole day. You barbecue your own lobster (or your nanny does) and you have one of those towelling onesies for grown-ups. You once worked the season and slept with a different surfer/au pair every night. ‘Good times,’ you say mistily over a lager top. You are now a banker.
Off-season ski resort
Is there anything more liberating than climbing a mountain? You often have the urge to run through the wild-flower meadows but you don’t because your backpack is a bit heavy and these walking boots are quite hot. You love Angela Merkel (‘So strong and stable’). You iron your tea towels and if someone opened your kitchen cupboards they would start backing out of the house slowly, making no sudden movements. You flirt with the idea of buying a dirndl or lederhosen. Just in case.
A Swedish island
You want to be clean. You want to eat fish and loads of foraged things. You want to be pure and forget about the election and North Korea and house prices and all the bad sex you’ve had in your life. So much bad sex. How much bad sex is too much bad sex? So this year you’ve hired a cabin on a remote Swedish island and you are going to be at one with nature. With big nature. Dramatic landscapes to help you forget all the drama. You will not spend the whole two weeks crying.
Home
‘Travelling in August is just screaming kids and inflated prices,’ you say. ‘It’s so peaceful at home.’ You find you have to hold your nerve with this one, particularly when browsing Instagram (#blessed) in the Tesco checkout queue. You veer wildly between smug and sorrowful and take up some kind of craft (needlepoint, perhaps pottery) or DIY (gardening, painting, filling the freezer for autumn) to feel you’ve achieved something at the end of the day. You have an ambitious reading list but in the end just reread Riders and The Da Vinci Code. You are in two minds about the success of your staycation but you do not admit this.
The Midults: Best quizzes
