I am Ready to Become Part of the Brave New World of Women Vacationing Without Their Family – and Holidaying Solo

A couple of weeks ago, I received an email about a media tour I would not countenance. It was overseas and it was about fitness, so it would have involved a lot of physical activity and early bedtimes. Even if I liked those activities, I wouldn't have been eager to spend a week with other people who enjoyed them. But even as I was hitting delete, 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 incredible. 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 Gladiator, and is extremely fit already, and yes, in hindsight, that should have been obvious all along.

So, without meaning to and without going anywhere, I've entered the fastest-growing travel group: the woman traveling alone, aged 45 to 60. One tour operator reported that nearly half (46%) of their bookings are now people going alone, and 70% of those are females. They have families, they have hectic social lives, they have spouses, their world is absolutely lousy 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 partners are unlikely to be in agreement on in their enthusiasm. If anyone is also sick of taking teenagers to the world's marvels, just to watch them be on their phones and field questions such as “how much longer do we have to be here?”, they are too discreet to mention it.

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