I’m taking a break ... from stress of escaping on holiday

WHAT is the point of going on holiday any more? Seriously: watching the chaos unfolding at ports and airports, I feel so bad for all those poor families stuck for hours in the sweltering heat, poor lost souls trapped in the Purgatory of French border control.

And it’s not just the passenger number restrictions at major hubs such as Heathrow, or the people being booted off flights, or the six-hour queues at Calais.

It’s all the rest, too: the selfimportant border guards, the jobsworth security staff who make you feel like dirt for accidentally forgetting to put your lip gloss in the designated plastic bag, or setting off metal detectors with the underwiring in your bra, or daring to ask, please, whether it might be possible not to rummage through your knickers in front of the entire airport.

The train cancella- tions, fare hikes, end- less strikes, overpriced shops, rip-off food on the plane, double rip-off baggage charges, infuriating online forms, e-tickets, the fact that when something goes wrong – which it always does – you’ve more chance of finding sentient life on Uranus than speaking to a human.

And all for what? So you can sit on a beach with all the people you were trying to get away from in the first place, worrying about how long it’s going to take you to get home – or indeed if you ever will.

Staycationing isn’t much better. Water companies pumping untreated sewage into designated bathing spots and rivers (over 25,000 times in 2021, according to the Environment Agency). Grumpy locals, enraged by inflated house prices driven up by second-home owners and buy-to-Airbnb landlords, congested motorways-slashdeath traps, courtesy of the Highways Agency’s homicidal insistence on removing hard shoulders and replacing them with socalled ‘smart’ motorways.

As for ‘letting the train take the strain’, forget it: astronomical fares make £2-a-litre petrol look like a bargain, and that’s if you can find a service not cancelled by strikes or derailed by some form of mildly adverse weather. The truth is that the companies and government agencies (don’t get me started on the ongoing passport office shambles) charged with running our basic infrastructure are either incompetent, lazy, venal or stupid – or a combination of all the above.

This may not matter so much while we’re all hard at work like good little drones, busy swelling the Treasury coffers so they can waste yet more of our money on yet more dead-end projects (led by yet more incompetents) such as HS2, or turning London into a giant fume-spewing car park with congestion-causing cycle lanes.

But when we decide to break free, however briefly, for some richly deserved R&R, that’s when the trouble starts.

There just isn’t the capacity. No margin for error. Everything is already stretched to breaking point, meaning even the slightest stress on the system – whether it be border controls, roads or even just a dodgy internet connection – and the whole show grinds to a halt.

And it’s always hard-working people, who suffer, since they can’t just hop on a private jet like Kylie Jenner (who this week took a 17minute flight), or Prince Harry, or any of the other weapons-grade hypocrites who lecture us all from their ivory towers.

Next Friday I’m supposed to be travelling to France for a week’s break. I planned to fly to Toulouse, but anticipating chaos at the airports, I decided to drive and take the ferry.

Now it seems even that way madness lies. Instead, I’m tempted to cancel the cat-sitter, order a case of Whispering Angel rosé, stock up on Camembert and frozen baguettes and just spend the week re-reading Peter Mayle. Might end up being the best holiday I never have.