It's precisely six hours into my holiday when I take a break from reading The Sellout and reach for the Lonely Planet guidebook.
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My first staycation in years and it's meant to be about relaxing, reading, seeing old friends and eating out. And this is what's happened so far. My laundry is in great shape. I'm nearly up-to-date with all my correspondence of the snail-mail variety. I'm reading non-essential books and watching The Crown. I'm cleaning out my drawers and, most importantly, I'm reaching for the next holiday.
This is not a criticism of staycations – although I'd like to declare that the Remainia tour (what Joyce across the road tells me is the name for this kind of holiday and not an invitation to see Britain before it dies) was not my idea. I love any place that's not home just to get a break from my usual routines and I've found it pretty hard to break the laundry habit of a lifetime within 10 kilometres of my trusty machine. And I know I will be in a better place after all the cleaning, sorting and reorganising.
In fact, I was pretty resistant to the idea of staying home when I could be travelling the world! Surely for a break to be really effective, it should be a real break! A million miles from care.
Not exactly.
The research of Jessica Bloom and others took the wind out of me setting sail. The researchers decided to see if holiday travel benefits people more than free time spent at home.
Sadly, the answer is no.
"In terms of pleasure and wellbeing, the differences between a free weekend at home and one away from one's usual domicile seemed rather small," they found.
When we spend time not working, we think about work less and we spend more time engaged in social activities. That all makes sense.
But unhappily for me, my next trip away will just shape my behaviour and my thoughts in "unique ways, but it does not seem to be strongly related to wellbeing".
Which seems unjust.
Even when I am away from home, I'm fantasising about the next time I will be away from home. And the time after that.
Travel marketers know this, which is why we see so many advertisements for escapes when we are on a break. Turns out that January is the time we see, hear and watch a lot of ads for holidays, in particular, ones we think we will have with our families. That's probably what prompts us all to start planning our next one while we are on this one. It's the only time we have to imagine what's possible.
Two English researchers, Sarah Hall and Clare Holdsworth, have distilled the essence of our holidays by looking at what it means for our families.
First, we do so much planning for these breaks, and we put a lot of effort into what will work for all those who plan to go on the holiday. It's about time, money, effort and how we can all get along, when we have competing priorities.
As Hall and Holdsworth put it: "Holidays are both rational and irrational: families save up for a holiday, but at the same time this might involve working longer hours and spending less times with others in order to have some time away together.
"Holidays are earned and are a reward, but they are also needed, acting simultaneously as treats and sacrifices."
Not sure about the comparative costs of staycations versus vacations but so far, my stay-at-home holiday has seen me spend a small fortune on eating out, drinking out, going out to events I would barely have time for in the normal course of my life. Where work would ensure that some of my weekends were spent organising myself for the week ahead, there is no such preparatory cooking and organising being done right now. Instead, some gentle lolling is followed by more gentle lolling.
If there is a routine, it hasn't made itself apparent since December 24. And I guess that's part of the benefit. On a working weekday, I have to exercise first thing in the morning in the most hideous and boring way possible, the gym. On a staycation, I can look at my step counter and discover I've walked 12 kilometres and hardly noticed the effort and I can still get to bed at a reasonable hour.
It's true I feel more rested than I would if I'd been returning home for a 24-hour flight so that's a bonus. But the call of the Grand Canal or the Great Barrier Reef is just too great.
And no matter what the research says, when it comes to the memories, those vast expanses, those extraordinary sights, will always mean more to me than my endless satisfaction with crisp, clean sheets and folded undies. Usually.
