Twenty-Something on family holidays

Until last week it never struck me as unusual that at the age of twenty-two (OOLLLLLDD!! how the frick did that happen?) I still holiday with my parents. I suppose it's kinda natural, they are my house-mates after all but it seems that the likelihood of many others my age - especially lads - would be doing the same things I was last week is pretty low

It was a fairly grown-up holiday, but retained a certain family flavour. We still ended up going to a zoo, for instance, which is usually the preserve of much younger families. It was pretty awesome, really. I'm not a fan of locking up animals for our entertainment but most of them had plenty of freedom and there was even a safari-park style area with acres and acres of wild habitat.

Still, not what you'd have expected me to be doing on holiday.

At times it was awkward and frustrating but the same can be said of most time spent with family. At least it was awkward and frustrating on the beach.

Finances dictated that we were based at a very isolated caravan park on the Isle of Sheppey which was fifty miles from the nearest beach with actual sand on it and 2 miles from the village it was supposedly based in. Whatever we wanted to do each day necessitated driving miles and miles and therefore all doing the same things together so as to avoid being on the road all day. This is fine when you're a kid and you just go with the flow. As one of four adults, you sometimes just want to do something different from everyone else or even just do nothing at all.

It was a bit of a shit holiday. Not because of being a family holiday, although being bound to three other people when you're just trying to relax probably didn't help the situation. No, what made it slightly soul-destroying was the one idiosyncrasy of the area: it had no idiosyncrasies. Everyone's the same and they're exactly the stereotype of their particular area. Despite being in Kent we couldn't escape the Essex accent that everyone seems to associate with the whole 100 mile area around London. Also, the number of balding men driving convertible sports cars with women who had all the characteristics of being conventionally beautiful apart from the most important one (you know, actually being beautiful) was frankly staggering. You know the kind of guys I mean, the ones that seem to have woken up one day with a topless hairstyle and immediately rushed out to buy a topless car in an attempt to continue to be able to get women topless.

The most depressing thing about the area was the air of cynicism that seemed to pervade everything, emanating from the endless parade of bald spots and their peroxide-blonde trophy wives driving around in BMWs. I guess you had to be there but there was something about the way everyone seemed to have drawn out a life plan at age fourteen that consisted of "fast car and fast woman" and then gone out there and made it happen. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for chasing your dreams but I just think they should usually be something a bit less tangible and a hell of a lot more real.

Anyway, the point is I'm happy to be back in the North where there's a little more variety to life and I don't have to cross a bridge that looks like something out of Mario Kart every time I want to go somewhere. Will I be going on a family holiday again? Probably yes. Back to the South East? Hell no.