At least climate change might save us from smug January holidaymakers
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Oh, aren’t you going away in the next few weeks? I’m so sorry, how embarrassing. Best not tell anyone about it because the hot January holiday has become quite the status symbol. Look, there’s Millie Mackintosh in her Melissa Odabash bikini in Mauritius. There’s Catherine-Zeta Jones in Kerala. There’s Boris Becker (hang on, wasn’t he just broke?), fresh out of prison and larking about topless on a West African island. There’s Lady Victoria Hervey in Barbados and Lady Daffodil Fish-Kettle in Antigua (I made the last one up).
Cape Town’s the destination for swallows, those who fly south from the UK around now. (“The way I see it, is why have one summer when you can have two?” says one human swallow who I won’t identify for his own protection.) Kenya’s another popular one, and there’ll be a couple of Royals kicking about Mustique before long. Sri Lanka, too. Sri Lanka’s definitely the sort of place that certain smug gits head to now. I know because I’m one of them, drifting about the south coast in a villa a coconut’s throw from Galle Fort.
Up I leap every morning and fling back the shutters to the sound of the magpie-robin and pale-billed flowerpecker chirruping merrily outside (thank you to my brilliant bird ID app, Merlin, which I cannot recommend highly enough if you’re enjoying yourself in, say, St Barts or Oman and need to identify the twittering in the nearby palm tree).
After a bit of bird spotting, I saunter to a large sofa on the covered terrace, or the hammock overlooking the pool, and loll about with a cup of tea brought to me by Rizwan, the villa’s excellent chef. At this hour, I’m occasionally entertained by the sight of a water monitor loping across the lawn (not a “crocodile”, as I screamed on my first trip), or a monkey swinging across the roof. Various friends slowly emerge from their bedrooms and we sit down to a tropical breakfast of fresh mango, curd, fried eggs on toast and faintly dubious coffee before discussing where we should have lunch that day – this beach restaurant or that beach restaurant?
Oh it’s a glorious thing, the January holiday. You flee the darkness of the UK and step from a long-distance flight, blinking like Bambi in the brilliant sunshine. This is what warmth feels like! You’d almost forgotten! The first morning may feel a bit dicey because you have to heave on a swimming cossie after 873 mince pies and half a Stilton at home, but I find a lunchtime glass of something soon calms those neuroses. Perhaps a spot of backgammon? A card game? Poor sods shivering in the UK, you think, reaching for another slice of Rizwan’s banana cake at tea time. This is the life.
Or at least it would be if it had stopped raining in the past week. According to one in Sri Lanka who knows, climate change has pushed the rainy season back and we’ve been very literally drenched and deluged since arriving. “Rain? That’s a bit rum,” I thought, as we motored south from Colombo Airport last week, “but no matter, the sun will be up before long.”
No sun, however. So no sunbathing, no lolling by the pool, and, alright, there’s been the odd beach restaurant for lunch but we were forced to eat grilled prawns and lobster sheltered by a corrugated iron roof while the rain beat down on top of us. At the villa, we lie on the sofas sulkily reading our books, scanning multiple different weather apps. “Apparently we might get half an hour of sunshine tomorrow morning!” I heard myself say a couple of days ago. Several roads have become impassable for tuk tuks and my hair has behaved so appallingly that I could have been mistaken for Struwwelpeter. We might as well be in London listening to the gurgle of the pigeons.
It feels especially unfair on my pal Oli, who decided to throw his 40th birthday here on New Year’s Eve in a villa with a vast stretch of lawn in front of it that ran to the beach and the rolling Indian Ocean beyond. Splendid. Except the lawn was flooded, the tables moved inside and my sequin jumpsuit ended up looking like Lizzie Bennett’s petticoat after a long walk – at least six inches deep in mud. And what is the point in having the kind of preposterous friends who decide to throw birthday parties in glamorous, faraway places if the weather’s going to behave as if it’s February in Wolverhampton?
You may be delighted to learn that the Maldives has also had a proper soaking in the past week or so. It’s another popular choice for showing off at this time of year, especially among those who’ve starred on Love Island. Molly-Mae Hague, for instance, who Telegraph readers may not be especially acquainted with but who’s been posting pictures from a sandy atoll in the past few days. “You know it’s a good holiday when it’s rained every single day torrentially and you’re still having the best time,” she wrote in one Instagram story, above a bikini selfie, while sheltering in her bedroom. But I recognise that sort of bluster. It’s the sort of thing you say defensively to friends back home when they suggest it “looks a bit rainy” in your Instagram post. “No, it’s been lovely actually, I’ve caught up with so much reading!”
I wasn’t absolutely averse to the idea of climate change when I thought it was simply going to warm the UK up a couple of degrees. Oddly, now it’s threatening my January holiday, I’m less keen. If Storm Henk’s put a dampener on your week, console yourself with the idea that those of us abroad have been having a jolly hard time of it too.
