Looking forward to a ‘relaxing’ break? You must be joking!

AH, for the days when the most stressful thing about going on holiday was making sure that you had enough of that funny foreign money in your pocket, and that your passport was in date.

As long as you had packed your best shirt, your new flip flops and enough pants, all you had to do was think about which drink you were going to have first... at the airport.

Fast forward to 2022 and it’s now a case of waking up at night in a cold sweat at the thought of everything which could go wrong with managing to get away for a ‘relaxing’ break.

In order to get to the point where you can create some of those special memories with your family, you now must negotiate a tortuous procedure where packing is the very last thing on your list.

Forget what drink you’re going to enjoy at the airport, these days it’s more of a concern whether your flight will even depart – and whether you can get there through the lengthy queues of traffic.

Once you’ve battled the motorways, you have the airport parking system in which you park in a field several miles from the terminal and then spend another 20 minutes standing up in a bendy bus while clinging to your luggage so it doesn’t roll across the aisle and smash into a primary schooler who is already nervous about their first trip on an aeroplane.

The images of miles of queues of lorries at the port of Dover injects a fresh batch of worry into everyone going via the sea route to France or Spain. And if you are travelling to France, you also have the concern over vaccines to worry about.

Taking a daughter who is about to turn 12 just a week before we go on our holiday means she has to have had her second jab and downloaded an NHS vaccine pass on to her phone merely to be allowed into the country.

The fact that she had her first jab 13 weeks before the holiday leaves us a window of two days in which she can be eligible for her second dose, but with enough time to be allowed into France.

Scouring the NHS website for a walk-in clinic which she can receive her jab instead of planning which restaurants we can visit is hardly the ideal preparation for holidays.

I almost booked tickets to a farming show which happened to have an NHS walk-in vaccination clinic so that I wouldn’t have to risk one of those ‘fit to fly’ antigen tests the day before leaving, for another three-figure sum, thanks very much.

It’s no wonder that many people have forsaken a foreign holiday and instead chosen a ‘staycation’ in the UK. Even then, you need to make sure you have secured bookings for the restaurants you want to visit, so you aren’t forced to alternate between Nando’s and McDonald’s for the entirety of your break.

Accommodation for a week in Devon and Cornwall now costs the same as the price which was paid for the building 30 years before.

Plus there’s the second mortgage on your own property you’ll need to cover the price of petrol to get there. Rail travel?

Forget it. If there isn’t a strike, then the ticket prices are higher than a return trip to the Moon with Jeff Bezos for company.

Of course, by the time we arrive in La France, it will all be worth it, and I am sure I won’t be thinking about the cost of having breakfast with a man in a Goofy costume that would have once bought me a five-day, allinclusive holiday to Greece.

Until then, I’ll have to counsel myself through the checklist, and make sure I’ve got enough for a €10 in-flight sandwich.

And breathe.