Opinion

Anita Robinson: Families should holiday at home, they might learn something

Staycations could be a popular holidday choice this year due to the threat of coronavirus
Staycations could be a popular holidday choice this year due to the threat of coronavirus Staycations could be a popular holidday choice this year due to the threat of coronavirus

2020 – the year we went nowhere on holiday – and spawned a new name for it – the ‘staycation’.

Like many of us, I’m basking in unaccustomed Norn Iron sunshine, albeit on the back doorstep between two bins, ruefully reflecting on the serial delights of the city of Vienna where I should be now with like-minded friends, imbibing art, architecture, music, wine and calorie-laden pastries.

The thing is, I loathe travelling. Love the destination, but hate getting there and back. Where travelling’s concerned, I’m a fatalist. I arrive ridiculously early for any form of transport. Trains and buses generate the panic of boarding the wrong one or missing my stop; ferries, the terror of going down like the Titanic; planes, the horror of crashing. I have a pathological fear of becoming a statistic.

Also, I’ve no great sense of direction. Even with a street map, I’ve got lost in several European cities. Once, all alone in Johannesburg airport, I half-heard a nearly indistinguishable flight called and joined the queue to board. Were it not for a sharp-eyed check-in clerk who spotted my mistake, I’d have ended up in Pietersburg, a different place entirely to my destination, which was Pietermaritzburg in Kwa Zulu Natal. Africa is no place for a Derry girl to get lost. The stomach-churning memory is with me still. Basically, I suffer a kind of intellectual paralysis and probably shouldn’t be let out alone.

And I do not travel light. It was a well-gnawed bone of contention with the late Loving Spouse, who had to carry most of it. “Why don’t you just run a rope round your wardrobe and drag it after you? he’d say. Useless to explain that as well as my major case, there’s the ‘in case’ case, whose contents cater for all eventualities, viz. what if it’s cold/hot/wet/dressy-uppy? Add medication, cosmetics and, of course, the right shoes. Surveys reveal people wear less than two-thirds of what they pack. Not in my case.

Well, if we have to stay at home, let’s make the best of it. Much is made of the temporary loss of our tourist trade. It constantly amazes me how little use locals make of the very attractions visitors come here and pay to see. If you discount the popularity of beaches and shopping malls, alarmingly few residents ever darken the door of a museum, gallery, historic building or ancient site in their immediate vicinity.

I taught one-and-a-half generations of children whose idea of a day out was trailing round the shops, the statutory visit to McDonald’s, then home, while dreaming of Disneyland. They had neither knowledge nor experience of the culture of their own place. As an ex-teacher, may I respectfully point out to parents, the ‘staycation’ has many advantages, chief among them being, it’s cheaper than Benidorm, no luggage or language difficulties and the comfort of sleeping in your own bed. Not to mention long overdue compensation to your children for your somewhat dilatory attitude to their home-schooling. Who knows what spark may be ignited in their young heads? Also, you’ll learn a lot yourself. Rewards? Togetherness, bragging rights (theirs) and a glow of conscious virtue (yours.) Disadvantages? The weather – mostly.

Travel doesn’t necessarily broaden the mind. I fail to understand the sea, sand and sun-worshippers who book a foreign holiday in say, for example, Greece – the cradle of civilization. So culturally incurious are they, shuttling exclusively between beach and hotel complex where they mourn the absence of Kelloggs cornflakes on the breakfast menu, won’t touch the calamares and meet only staff and other tourists. They’ve come for a good tan and a good time. Blithely unaware they’ve (metaphorically speaking) spread their towels on a site where battles were won and lost, where dynasties rose and fell, they’re seemingly immune to absorbing a sense of the place, nor remotely interested in its unique and multi-layered story; impervious to its culture and ancestry, unmoved by the relics and ruins of time long past. But then many of us are equally culpable of similar failures in the place we call home….