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

A couple of weeks back, I received an email about a press trip I would not countenance. It was overseas and it was about health, so it would have involved a lot of physical activity and early nights. Even if I liked those things, I wouldn't have been desperate to spend a week with other people who enjoyed them. But even as I was deleting it, I started to wonder what that would really be like: being somewhere new, without anyone to please except myself, without anything to do except exactly what I wanted. Clearly, it would be incredible. So I said “yes” and it emerged they meant the other Zoe Williams, the one who is a doctor and used to be a Gladiator, and is incredibly fit already, and yes, in retrospect, that should have been clear all along.

So, without intending to and without traveling anywhere, I've entered the fastest-growing travel group: the woman traveling alone, aged 45 to 60. One travel company stated that nearly half (46%) of their bookings are now people going alone, and 70% of those are women. They have families, they have busy social lives, they have partners, 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 adventurous the travel, the more people are undertaking it alone. People are very interested in trekking, biking, paddling, all the things that couples are unlikely to be aligned on in their interest. If anyone is also sick of taking 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 puzzle is why it’s taken so long to get here. My father's wife, who is completely 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 constantly, 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.