Gone is the prospect of a damp staycation — sunny Malaga, I’m coming your way

Sunbathing, swimming in the sea, reading a book a day... Spain is perfect
Will Langenberg/Unsplash
Anna van Praagh23 June 2020
WEST END FINAL

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Should I Stay or Should I Go (abroad) has become my power ballad of summer 2020.

I’m obsessed with my annual two-week holiday to Spain at the end of August and will move heaven and earth to get there.

Would I die for it, though? That’s the thorny question I’ve been mulling over as I’ve watched the world descend into a less exciting, but infinitely more frightening version of World War Z, with fewer zombies, more queuing at Sainsbury’s and Brad Pitt’s rippling heroics traded in for 5pm TV slots with Matt Hancock.

Then, it started to look like a fate even worse than death awaited anyone going abroad — an enforced quarantine on either side of a two-week break.

Whichever way you sliced it, my holiday was looking grim. So how delighted am I that this week quarantine measures have been cancelled for British people travelling to Spain.

Spain has traditionally been a favourite destination for us Brits, with more than 18 million heading there last year. Why wouldn’t we?

Anna van Praagh
Matt Writtle

Tickets are cheap, blazing heat is guaranteed all summer, unlike France, and the locals are friendly (also unlike France).

I was almost — almost — getting used to the idea that I might embark upon the world’s dreariest invention, “a staycation”.

Let’s face it, anyone who says they prefer to holiday at home is a bare-faced liar. Sure, we’ve all had that one sunny weekend in Cornwall where we’ve thought, ‘Isn’t this wonderful?’

But just try to capture that experience again.

Chances are you’ll be shivering in some drab beachside café with the whole of Clapham drinking the kind of horrible grey coffee out of a glass you thought had gone out of fashion in the Seventies, wondering how you could have been so stupid.

Yes, it’s a gorgeous place, but the weather often spoils it. Oh, and good luck with the 11-hour car journey home in lashing rain with screaming kids in the back. What fresh hell indeed.

No, I won’t be making that mistake again. I much prefer the early flight from a drab Heathrow, landing three hours later at a blindingly sunny Malaga airport.

Pick up the rental car and within 30 minutes you’re winding along the spectacular Spanish coast.

Head straight to the beach, drink a glass of wine at the chiringuito and pass-out on the beach for three hours with no sun cream so that you start your holiday looking like a freshly boiled lobster.

That bit is, I’m afraid, mandatory. Forget sightseeing — I love sunbathing, swimming in the sea, reading a book a day, wine at lunch and achieving Bret Easton Ellis levels of emotional blankness for two weeks. I am beach basic.

The sea, the sand, the gentle sound of being surrounded by people talking a language you don’t understand (even though you have been on holiday there for 30 years)… Pass the sangria, let the holidays begin.

Why the forties are fabulous

Winona Ryder has said that she didn’t like her thirties, but she has really liked her forties. I couldn’t agree more.

The thirties are a bloodbath for women, scrabbling to work, save up for a home, find a partner, have children or make the agonising decision not to.

Most of us spent the whole thing crying in the loos at work because a colleague said they were pregnant or on IVF .

Reaching 40 feels like that scene in films where they emerge from the fire, brutalised and charred, wistfully surveying the wreckage.

Thank God that’s all over is all I can say.

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