The latest acronym on the block is SKI-er – older travellers cavalierly spending their kids’ inheritance. Those in the travel industry are using it to explain the increase in over-60s holidaying abroad. I’m one and very much enjoying it, too.
One of the great discoveries of becoming freelance was that, after decades of being tied to a four-week holiday entitlement (five for long service), I could suddenly take as much holiday as I wished, or could afford.
‘Oh you’ve just been on holiday again,’ people say when we return from four days in Majorca. Or: ‘You’re always on holiday.’
It’s not true. To set the record straight, I added up how many days I’ve been abroad this year and it came to 23 – two less than I would have taken when I was employed. But we probably go to many more destinations.
It’s easier to simply up and leave for short breaks now that I’m no longer in the grip of school-holiday timetables and relentless work commitments.
We can take the cheaper travel options out of term time and head off mid-week if we wish. We’re no longer having to bankroll the family holiday either (although, to be honest, I’d love to try to get our disparate blended troupe together in a villa one day) and we don’t have to lure our children to travel with us by offering to take their friends.
I feel no shame in being a SKI-er. The way inheritance tax is going, the money we are currently spending on easyJet and booking.com would have ended up in the pocket of HMRC, rather than my son’s, anyway.
Alexandra Shulman attends a cocktail party in 2018
Pension pot is going on a new sweater
On which subject, a financial guy I was talking to the other day reminded me, as I moaned about Labour’s new plans for pensions to be taxed as part of our estate, that pensions are meant to be spent on ourselves when alive.
You are number one in the list of priorities, he told me – a comment which made me feel a whole lot better about going out and buying a new sweater.
The heatwave has left us cracking up
London has become the crack capital of Britain. Not crack cocaine, but the crevices that have sprung up on the walls and ceilings of many homes. This unusually hot summer shrunk the clay foundations of the city and baked the brick walls of the houses, creating terrifying faultlines.
Our house has so many cracks I have to close my eyes as I walk around, as I’ve become obsessed with watching them spread.
I long for the rain to come and stop their relentless travel, which as a sun-lover is something I thought I’d never say.
A builder visited and calmly suggested solutions for the thermal cracking, reassuring me that the house would not fall down. As he left he said he had three more visits to deal with the same issue. It’s an epidemic.
Girls crush Cruise’s epic disaster movie
You’d imagine a company with the track record of Warner Bros would have had the common sense to go nowhere near Digger, Tom Cruise’s epic disaster of a movie.
The film, by Oscar-winning director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, had a production budget of $180 million (£135 million) along with a marketing budget of around $100 million (£75 million).
Any fool could predict this was going to be a proper turkey from just a few minutes of the trailer. It must make Paramount, which bought Warner Bros last month for a cool £82 billion, wonder if it’s made the right decision.
Contrast this with Extra Geography, an independent British film by director Molly Manners, about young love in a girls’ boarding school.
Based on a short autobiographical story by Rose Tremain, the movie is shot entirely in one location and, as far as I can see, required no elaborate and costly computer-generated imagery.
The most elaborate thing in the whole film is the name of one of the two lead actresses – Galaxie Clear. She and her co-star Marni Duggan play the teenage schoolgirls with pitch perfect humour and pathos. The film’s budget was under £1million.
Galaxie Clear in independent British film Extra Geography
No perm, but maybe a shampoo and set…
Although I agree with Victoria Beckham, who considers 15 too young for her daughter Harper to have a perm, I did love having one myself. Admittedly not at 15, but 22, when I had a kind of lose-wave perm. It gave my straight hair a delightful shaggy look rather than a tight frizz.
At the time I hoped to resemble the actress Maria Schneider in Last Tango In Paris, an ambition which may or may not have been obvious to others. Eventually the perm grew out and I am not sure why I didn’t repeat the exercise.
Now, at the opposite end of the age spectrum, I am considering returning to salon curls, becoming one of those women who, in my mother’s era, had their weekly shampoo and set.
More Noele Gordon from Crossroads than Maria Schneider.
Victoria Beckham’s perm in 1988. She considers 15 too young for her daughter Harper to have a perm
One hangover I’m not familiar with
Journalist Hannah Betts confided in me that, after a busy evening, she was suffering ‘an introvert hangover’. I was curious about this concept.
Apparently it’s when you are suffering the effects of an overload of social activity. Familiar as I am with all manner of hangovers, this is one that I’ve never experienced.
But it made me wonder if it’s possible to have an extrovert hangover, which presumably would be when you haven’t had enough company to keep you upbeat. That would be one I recognise.
Clearing out my life, one page at a time
My new love object is my shredder. Having just bought this fantastic gadget, I can’t think why I’ve never owned one before.
Clearing out boxes of irrelevant paperwork and reducing them to bags of confetti is delightfully relaxing and more therapeutic than meditation or a head massage.
