Dear Reader

EVERYONE is dreading travelling overseas — but there’s little sign that we’re giving up on it. Indeed, there have been reports this week of ‘staycation fatigue’ seeping into the system, with hotspots such as Cornwall, Devon and Norfolk saying there are vacancies this summer where there were none last year.

Mind you, anyone spending a week or two beside the British seaside during this heatwave can count themselves exceptionally lucky. So lucky in fact that they might not tempt fate and do it again in 12 months’ time.

What a resilient lot we are. We go with the flow even when that means standing in a queue for hours and not knowing for sure if the plane will take off once we’ve shuffled to the front.

Perhaps it’s also that we tend to remember foreign trips longer than ones taken within the UK.

Is that because the effort involved is so much more? Or because we agree with what the travel writer Edward Readicker-Henderson said about ‘whoever created the world went to a lot of trouble — and it would be downright rude not to go out and see as much of it as possible’?

For a long time, my parents thought there was something decadent about holidays overseas, vulgar even. And my grandparents’ travel only ever took them as far as Bournemouth.

But we did go to Deauville (pictured) in France one year. I must have been about ten, my brother three years older. We went swimming in a huge public pool before my brother’s trousers went missing from the changing room and he had to spend the rest of the day with a towel around his waist. I found it irresistibly funny, he hated every moment. But we both remember it as if it happened yesterday.

Then, there are those whose job is to travel. As we show on pages 56 and 57, for all the hassle involved, there’s no shortage of men and women wanting to become flight attendants. Which is a welcome endorsement for travel. Perhaps pilots and cabin crew are the true blue-sky thinkers.