Sometimes Holidays... Are Worse

Hello. This is a post about how holidays operate in a weird kind of space where you're sort of under pressure to enjoy them. You get on the plane at 5am and the plane is too hot and you feel sick and you get off the plane 3 hours later and wonder for a second if you've flown to Neptune somehow by mistake, because it is colder than Piers Morgan's heart up in here, and then you can't find the bus you need to take and nothing makes sense and you ALREADY have a blister on the back of your foot and OH NO WHERE IS YOUR PASSPORT?! Oh, it's in your hand. Okay.

Berlin at night. It's beautiful.

Don't get me wrong, holidays are amazing and an immense privilege. I'm incredibly grateful that I have been able to visit the countries I've been to, and I'm not one to rubbish an opportunity that I am very fortunate to have. With that said, I just feel a little bit as if I ought to want to be travelling as much as possible and twirling around in awe at everything the moment I even think about another country, and it's a bit much sometimes. I suppose a lot of people who are around my age are unable to afford to live away from their parents but are able to afford holidays, so maybe there's some level of desperate escapism going on there. We're on holiday, so everything's perfect, right? Obviously it's always popular to explore the world - it's an inherently exciting and enriching thing to do, isn't it? But the reality of it is that it's life. A different kind of life in a different kind of place, yes, but life all the same with all its extremely normal things and all its inconveniences, illnesses, and discomforts.

I mean, why spend hundreds of pounds to somehow get lost next to really obvious landmarks and catch an awful cold on the way in when you can just go down the shops, pretend you're a tourist who has never seen the local art sculpture which is just a sad rectangle of rusting metal, and catch a disease in Poundland?

We stayed in Alexanderplatz - it's really nice and I strongly recommend Berlin despite the fact that I am moaning about the entire concept of holidays in this post. Sorry for being terrible. Visit Berlin if you fancy it though.

I suppose the issue for me is the combination of a nice concoction of travelling anxieties, and the fact that I can't be comfortable without 329,739 lip balms permanently attached to my face and an elaborate entourage of stylists working 24/7 to provide me with the correct ratio of cuteness to weather resistance. I'm not the greatest with directions and I seem to have a knack of developing some kind of persistent minor injury whilst abroad (blisters in Iceland from apparently ill-fitting boots that had never been a problem before, for example).

"Delicous breakfast".

I also genuinely wish we would give a lot more weight and appreciation to exploring more locally. I love exploring the vast portions of London that I'm not yet very familiar with, let alone every other little bit of the UK. There is so much out there that is so much closer to us than fashionable, trendy global locations. Maybe I'm just a bit too into jumping in the cold Scottish sea, but sometimes those little UK places feel so much bigger and brighter than travelling across some mysterious and cool new bit of Europe.

One of the greatest holidays of my life was going to Oxford, a mere 50-60 miles away from where I live. Of course, my favourite holiday takes place every day when I walk from my bedroom to the fridge.

This cafe is the best thing ever. A tiny ice cream cone with every cup of tea. Amazing.

Listen, I'm just saying let's stay here and go somewhere local so I can go home at the end of the day and lie in my own bed, which has its own mysterious healing properties and doesn't cost £400 and demand that I put my toothpaste in a sealed plastic bag.