I'm Ready to Become Part of the Brave New World of Women Leaving Their Family – and Traveling Solo

A couple of weeks back, I received an message about a press trip I would never consider. It was long haul and it was about health, so it would have entailed a lot of exercise and early bedtimes. Even if I liked those things, I wouldn't have been desperate to spend a week with other people who liked them. But even as I was deleting it, I started to think what that would actually be like: being somewhere different, without anyone to accommodate except myself, without anything to do except exactly what I wanted. Plainly, it would be amazing. So I said “yes” and it emerged they meant the different Zoe Williams, the one who is a doctor and used to be a Gladiator, and is incredibly fit already, and yes, in hindsight, that should have been obvious all along.

So, without meaning to and without traveling anywhere, I've entered the most rapidly expanding travel demographic: the woman traveling alone, aged 45 to 60. One travel company reported that nearly half (46%) of their bookings are now people travelling alone, and 70% of those are females. They have households, they have busy 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 big into hiking, biking, paddling, all the things that couples are unlikely to be aligned on in their interest. If anyone is also sick of dragging teenagers to the wonders of the world, 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 discreet to mention it.

The real mystery is why it’s taken so long to get here. My father's wife, who is totally modern in every way, would get detained before she’d go into a European restaurant on her own, and even though I mock her for this often, I must have had a trace of it myself, to be this old before it even occurred to me to travel solo. Now I just have to go somewhere.