I am Ready to Become Part of the Brave New World of Females Leaving Their Loved Ones – and Holidaying Alone

A couple of weeks back, I got an email about a media tour I would never countenance. It was long haul and it was about health, so it would have involved a lot of physical activity and early nights. Although I liked those activities, I wouldn't have been desperate to spend a week with other people who liked them. But even as I was hitting delete, I started to wonder what that would really be like: being somewhere different, without anyone to please except myself, without anything to do except exactly what I wanted. Plainly, it would be amazing. So I said “yes” and it turned out they meant the different Zoe Williams, the one who is a doctor and used to be a TV Gladiator, and is extremely fit already, and yes, in hindsight, that should have been obvious all along.

So, without intending to and without traveling anywhere, I've arrived in the fastest-growing travel group: the female solo traveller, aged 45 to 60. One travel company stated that nearly half (46%) of their bookings are now people travelling alone, and 70% of those are women. They have households, they have hectic social lives, they have spouses, their world is absolutely full with people they could go on holiday with – and that’s why they (we) need a holiday on their own.

The more daring the travel, the more people are undertaking it alone. People are very interested in hiking, biking, paddling, all the things that partners are unlikely to be aligned on in their enthusiasm. If anyone is also tired of dragging teenagers to the world's marvels, just to watch them be on their phones and answer questions such as “how much longer do we have to be here?”, they are too tactful to mention it.

The real mystery is why it’s taken so long to reach this point. My stepmother, who is completely modern in every way, would get arrested before she’d go into a Belgian restaurant on her own, and even though I mock her for this often, I must have had a vestige of it myself, to be this old before it even came to mind to travel solo. Now I just have to go somewhere.