Staycation: This is how you can spend the whole year on holiday
HOLIDAYS are expensive and time-consuming. But if you can’t afford one this year, worry not. There’s a way for you to enjoy a year-round vacation without spending big or quitting your job.
HOLIDAY. It’s such an enchanting word. How it looks. How it sounds. What it promises. Used before other words — “reads”, “houses”, “romances” — it’s like sprinkling glitter over the everyday.
Shame, then, that I haven’t had one this year.
Nope, a full 12 months has passed without so much as a sun lounger or a dog-eared beach house novel, or a long evening in a pub garden tapping my thongs to Talking Heads (yep, showing my vintage).
Sure, there’s been the odd weekend away, but not one of those delicious long breaks where the days pass without names and you laze around laughing and sinking love into your children.
Before I get ambushed with emails pointing out that I’m hardly battling ISIS or Ebola, yes of course living in Australia is like being on a permanent holiday (complete with Jacqui Lambie as tour guide). But surely we all need to step away from our diaries and responsibilities occasionally.
Yet as I round the final curve in 2014 — and goodness knows I can’t wait to see the finish line — I’ve learned that we need to re-educate ourselves on the notion of “escape”.
During my year journeying nowhere, I kept a quote in my notebook from the acerbic food and travel writer A.A. Gill. Adrian has the best job in the world, and was recently here for Tourism Australia’s gala dinner in Tasmania. For someone who undoubtedly spends half his life in business class, he’s remarkably insightful on our escalating need to self-medicate our tired lives with a plane ticket and a cocktail.
“Escape what?” he asks. “Travelling is time-out between two dimly-clichéd places — a here that is fraught, hectic, relentless and infuriating, and a there that is peaceful, comforting, effortless and undemanding. But if that really describes your home and your holidays, then you’re living your life the wrong way round.”
Resonate? Yep, me too. So this year, I’ve tried to bring “there” to “here”, which is not to say chez Mollard is now decked out with a Moroccan-tiled spa complete with white robes in every bedroom and “tasting plates” for dinner (just seeing the floor in my daughters’ bedrooms would constitute a holiday).
Rather, having gleaned the fact that my work commitments and budget would not allow two weeks’ sailing in Croatia, I sought to make small changes that might imbue ordinary life with the delights, comfort and sensual pleasures you’d typically enjoy on vacation.
I started in the bedroom — new doona cover, scented candles and daily removal of newspapers and discarded clothes. Cleaning the windows in the ensuite provided a glorious bird’s eye view of neighbouring gardens, bursting with bougainvillea and birdlife. It’s extraordinary how enjoyable it is to clean your teeth while watching a magpie gorge itself on a seed pod.
In the kitchen I adopted a “picnic” approach over the arduousness of planned and prepped meals. Jamie Oliver’s pre-marinated lamb with tahini sauce ($13 in Woollies) quickly became a favourite, along with prawn tortillas, cooked in seconds, and served with bowls of tomatoes, coriander and flash-grilled corn.
Exercise, for so long a labour without love, is now everyday and incidental: a power walk with a friend every Wednesday; boxing on Fridays; a daily blitz through the 7 Minute Workout app. Best of all, any days I’m working from home, I dress in bathers and a kaftan because it guarantees I’ll try like mad to squeeze in a 20-minute swim.
Other small pleasures: smelling the gardenias rather than passing them by; a portable speaker so I can listen to music in any room in the house; soft cotton maxi dresses that swirl round the ankles; toenails painted coral that wink like tropical fish in the ocean; limes sliced into soda on those days that demand something more special than water but less damaging than wine; sleep, because sometime in the last five years it’s gone from basic need to luxury; gazing at my children because, as author Anna Quindlen says, “I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.”
Has it felt like a holiday? Yes, in part. Mostly, it just feels healthy — as if joy is not predicated on some expensive, Michelin-starred “trip of a lifetime” but threaded through the ordinary. It’s like stringing fairy lights into a tree, or realising that weight is not maintained by bingeing then starving but by liking your body enough to treat it well. It reminded me of taking the kids to England three years ago — they saw Stonehenge and Legoland, but were most excited by lying still in a paddock and being sniffed by cows.
Anyway, I think I’m on to something because this week Reddit came out with the most “disappointing destinations on earth”. Los Angeles was dismissed as a “lie”, Paris as “smelling like urine” and Venice as “Disneyland for middle-aged American yuppies”.
I plan to spend the summer at home on a “staycation”, listening to Talking Heads and letting the days go by.
Email: angelamollard@gmail.com
Twitter: @angelamollard
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