You'll never guess what I really like about going on holiday

Times

4 days ago

Mid-July, and we are in the middle of Peak Holiday Season — the six weeks in which everyone at some point will either ask or be asked, 'Do we have any of those aqua-shoe thingies? You know — for rock pools? Look like verruca shame slippers? Smell, inexplicably, like old turnips?'
Obviously, no one needs to be reminded of the classic aspects of Holiday Season: no work! Having a lie-in! Consuming up to five pub lunches! And, of course, the big family argument — which always happens on the Tuesday.
However, as you age, you start getting into the smaller, more niche aspects of holidaying. Because, by and large, all beach days, pleasant walks and visits to National Trust tearooms are the same. But the Secondary Holidaying Aspects? Well. They're for the Holiday Connoisseur alone.
For instance: other people's Netflix habits. If you're hiring a cottage or Airbnb, there's a 50-50 chance the previous occupants forget to log out of their streaming account before leaving. Which allows you, as an ever curious observer of human behaviour, to work as an Algorithm Archaeologist — guessing who was here before you and how their holiday went.
The most recurrent is kids' stuff: when you see that Frozen and Frozen 2 have both been watched back to back, you know that the last week saw unceasing, brutal rain. You know it contained multiple attempts to engage an obstreperous four-year-old with the cottage's Buckaroo — which has half the pieces missing — before some exasperated parent sighed, 'OK! I give in! Let's spend our summer holiday watching a sassy snowman! Fine!'
Other times, it's more… unexpected. In one villa in Corfu, I discovered the previous occupants were obsessed with Japanese YouTubers. The kind who film, with serene minimalism, their daily routines: sweeping their floors with rustic brooms or slowly preparing enoki mushrooms. Here I sensed a neurodivergent teenager, on holiday under duress, firmly eschewing the horror of a boating day trip — probably to a rock covered in gannets, which are both raucous and unloveable — in favour of sitting at home with a Ribena, watching someone craft miso from scratch. And fair enough.
I will skim over the Penrith cottage where Amazon Prime revealed a week containing every single movie made by Guy Ritchie — as it's embarrassing that 'men in their early thirties on a stag weekend' should be so predictable.
Then there are the joys of the new area you have travelled to. Simpler people get excited about the mountains, moors or valleys. The more practised holidaymaker, on the other hand, is excited by a far more potent local joy: a small local supermarket.
Our own local supermarkets are as familiar to us as our hands, or dogs. Which is why being in someone else's local supermarket feels so… transgressive. Almost like, after 30 years of marriage, sleeping with a new partner. The baskets are a different colour! They sell a vodka called 'Garry'! The washing-up liquid comes out of a mad giant dispenser! The first aisle doesn't have fruit and veg but something weird, like 'magazines and giant lollipops', or 'sunhats and charcoal briquettes'.
In smaller, more isolated supermarkets, hardcore grocery nerds can get off on an aspect common to all small supermarkets: the laissez-faire attitude to the true sell-by date of grapes. Those guys are often pushing the envelope so hard, what they're selling is, technically, not 'grapes' but 'a bunch of sultanas'. To eat a deflating brown grape is to taste the true terroir of Bodmin.
Finally: The Big Wash. I'm not sure where feminism stands on The Big Wash — it's been slightly distracted by both the trans issue and Sabrina Carpenter. But, without exception, every woman I know over the age of 40 confesses that one of their favourite moments of a holiday is getting home, kicking all the accumulated post out of the way, and putting all the holiday clothes onto a mixed load.
'There's something so satisfying about it!' 'It's like rolling the credits on your holiday: like, 'You having been watching… these shorts! And that T-shirt!' 'If the day's good enough to peg it out afterwards, I consider it the final holiday treat.'
Is it unfeminist for a woman to consider laundry 'a final holiday treat'? I don't know any teenagers, or men, who are gagging to chuck a Surf 3-in-1 pod into a load of knickers on 30 degrees. All the not-women seem to spend their first hours home 'catching up on important emails' or ringing the cottage firm to see if the cleaners have found their iPhone charger. It's just the ladies who are ecstatically spot-treating a Piz Buin stain on a pair of pleated culottes. And yet, we are happy. Happy with our niche holiday joys.