Why bother going on holiday when I can watch other people’s on TikTok? | Emma Beddington

Getting there is horrible, too. Train travel should be bliss, but privatisation and other people have put paid to that. Cars mean having to tetchily navigate tailbacks as Sabrina Carpenter tunes bore into your brain, or crying as your navigation app redirects you – and every other road user – along a dirt track, where local people, who had never seen a stranger until Waze was invented, wave pitchforks at you. You have to scour the shelves of the Welcome Break for anything that wouldn’t give Tim Spector an aneurysm and pee in places that will be for ever seared on your psyche. Airports are canonical purgatory and aeroplanes are an insanitary hell, tainted by flygskam (the Swedish anti-flight movement). After a couple of hours of any travel, I am ready to move into a self-dug burrow that I heat with my own waste and live off lichen.