Our new normal A year of living cautiously

Actor Charlie Condou and his family discovered the joys of British holidays during the course of 2020

We’ve never hesitated to drag our kids around the world on complicated holidays. My husband’s parents live in a small town in Alberta, Canada and we try to get out there every couple of years. One Christmas we took our daughter Georgia, then two years old, to meet her godparents in Vermont. That involved flying in to New York and staying the night, a time I’ll never forget because I was so deliriously tired that I took G out for a walk in the pram in Central Park at 2am to try to get her to sleep. The next day we drove six hours to Vermont.

We wouldn’t do it if the kids didn’t love it. They talk nostalgically about hanging out in Dunkin’ Donuts in Hanna, Alberta, as if it were the best place on earth. One summer, we somewhat hastily booked an Airbnb in a coastal resort town on Gran Canaria that turned out to be an ugly, characterless place. The kids didn’t notice. We found a quiet, pretty beach down the coast and regularly ended our days with visits to an ice-cream parlour, followed by card games, and they were over the moon. There was nothing all that extraordinary about the trip, but they look back on it as their visit to paradise.

Part of the appeal of air travel for Georgia and Hal (our son) may be that they can watch television uninterrupted for hours. If I’m honest, that’s partly why I love air travel. There’s nothing better than being cosily in your seat with three or four films queued up. The downside of these expeditions is that there is nothing worse than when a three-hour trip turns into a nine-hour one because something has gone wrong at the airport or with the transport links, and your family ends up getting frazzled before you’ve even started.

Then Covid-19 changed the face of travel. One of my abiding memories of the first national lockdown was standing out in my garden in London, looking up at the sky and seeing... well, nothing but birds. In London, you get used to a lot of air traffic, to the web of contrails it leaves, and for the first time in my life, the sky was calm and empty.

So last year, no trip to Canada to see the relatives, no hop to somewhere in Europe for a bit of sun, no airports whatsoever. My husband Cam’s and my new favourite city is Amsterdam, and although that’s only about 200 miles away, even it was out of reach. If we were going to take breaks, we needed to keep it simple and play it safe.

A friend has a house in St Ives that we borrowed for a week. That was our big holiday. The town was rammed, and the weather was a bit “meh”, but the kids didn’t care: there are so many lovely beaches, and so many sweet shops, that they were in their element. For Cam and I, too, it was a pleasure to march to a beach, sit and play in the sand, watch the kids play in the icy water, or dive in ourselves and scream. It felt like this was how holidays used to be done, when we were kids. It was surprisingly restorative.

Other than that, we visited friends who live in the country, or borrowed places outside London for short breaks, as often as we could. My parents have a place on the coast in Hythe, Kent, and although the “beach” there is made up of chunky shingle, the kids love spending all day playing on the rocks or splashing in the shallows. The big windows looking out over the English channel are hypnotic and restful.

The lesson I learned from 2020 is this: as long as there is a beach or somewhere to swim, and as long as Cam and I spend plenty of time banging about with them, our children are happy wherever we go. We now see taking a local holiday in a new light, and we’re much more likely to do it again. The countryside outside the M25 can be as glorious as anywhere more exotic we’ve been.

It felt like this was how holidays used to be done, when we were kids. It was surprisingly restorative

iCharlie Condou, his husband, Cam, and children, Georgia and Hal, enjoy a stroll on the beach