Caitlin Moran: Buying exactly the right amount of supplies is now the best part of my holiday

YOU know you’re in your forties when the most satisfying part of your holiday is buying the exact right amount of toilet paper – and other supplies – to last you the trip, writes Caitlin Moran.

HOLIDAYS when you’re young work as a combination of SAS: Who Dares Wins, Eat, Pray, Love and the bit in Pinocchio where the boys go to Pleasure Island and have the time of their lives smoking cigars, drinking whisky and wearing hats at jaunty angles, before getting turned into donkeys and being sold into donkey slavery.

When you are bloom-faced and jejeune, a holiday is where you survive on your wits in a hostel filled with bugs, have epiphanies looking at sunsets and funnel as many cheap local spirits into yourself as possible – as if trying to turn yourself into a Molotov cocktail when you light a cigarette. A holiday is a thing of extremes; a leap into the unknown; a joyous enstupiding; a chance to come back as someone completely different – possibly, Julia Roberts. Or someone who has exploded.

Holidays in your youth are a thing of extremes, a leap into the unknown. Picture: iStock

Then you hit your forties.

I’m currently on the last day of my summer holidays – a week in Corfu, followed by five nights in Cornwall – and I can tell you what has satisfied me most about these potentially transformative experiences in exquisitely beautiful locations, away from the daily grind of work, free to drink Champagne from 10am, wear a bikini, swim in warm seas, turn my brain off and be constantly surrounded by loved ones.

Buying exactly the correct amount of toilet paper for our self-catering villa.

Of course, that’s not really been my primary joy on this holiday. I’ve tweaked the facts to make a more amusing statement. In actuality, my primary joy on this holiday has been buying exactly the correct amount of toilet paper, sunblock, butter, figs, milk, melon-flavour lollies, small cans of Mythos lager and tokens for the extortionately priced water slides at AquaWorld. As I have frequently said, with the swagger of a seasoned cowboy, as I purchased exactly the right number of dishwasher tablets for 12 people over six days and seven nights in a hard-water area – vital information, googled in advance – “This isn’t my first holiday rodeo.”

If reaching middle age is to mean anything, it is surely having learnt the true heartbreak of leaving six 2-litre pots of premium-brand ice cream in the freezer of a holiday cottage on the Gower peninsula – because in the end you didn’t get around to having that crazy “Coke float sundae” you envisaged. In what your teenage children refer to amusedly as your “twilight years”, your holiday shopping list is fiercely, frugally on point. Astronauts on the International Space Station have been provisioned with more largesse. You will lie in bed on the last night – looking out across the Ionian Sea, air perfumed with jasmine, cocktail in hand – and sigh, “There is exactly one bin bag left. This holiday has been perfect.”

Holidaying in your forties is discovering the rare joy of buying the exact right amont of things you need for the trip. Picture: iStock

It’s not just accurate bin bag provision that satisfies the older vacationer. We also rejoice in being retrospectively horrified by previous holidays – ones we quite enjoyed at the time. “God! Imagine if we were surfing right now!” my husband will gloat, sitting on a chair and reading a book. “Imagine if we were putting on wetsuits before being pummelled by the hateful sea. Imagine if we got earache for a week, and got stung by a weever fish, and there was an aggressive yet unskilled Competitive Dad who kept surfing into our heads. NO.”

Or, while sitting in a tearoom, eating scones: “Christ! Some f...ers are skiing now. They’re still at it. Carrying the skiing gear of two children under six up a mountain and living on boiled wine and boiled cheese. How unbearably dreadful.”

Each age has its own value system. When you’re younger, you value chaos and extremity in a holiday. Throw the dice! It’s all a crazy experiment! Besides, when you retire at 65, you’ll immediately look like Judith Chalmers and spend the rest of your life on a luxury cruise up the Nile – so these holidays are mere amuse-bouches before three decades of playing quoits with the captain, ripped to the tits on gin.

By the time you get to 43, however, you realise you spent all the money you should have put into your pension plan on those shit skiing holidays and gallons of uneaten ice cream – and so you’re now going to have to work until you drop dead.

There’s no Nile cruise. Forget about Captain Gin Tits. Those mere four weeks off a year? That’s it. That is your retirement – in tiny mouthfuls, between endless deadlines. No wonder you value a tried-and-tested holiday, which you can calibrate down to the last sheet of two-ply. If you can’t pretty much guarantee every one of your precious 21 days off a year will be perfect, then all your tension will remain unrelieved, and you’ll get to December, have a nervo over the unexpectedly large amount of toilet paper your in-laws have used over Christmas, and explode.

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