Debt-tripping ... Anita Sethi in India. Photograph: Karen Bristoll
Another British winter was drawing to an end. February. Depression month. I was on the verge of doing something desperate. Desperate times call for desperate measures. "I'm desperate to leave the country", I had been muttering for weeks.
It was my third consecutive year without doing so. I was 15k in debt - so why would I spend more on a holiday? But with the weather crushing down, and the burden of debt seemingly never going to take a long haul flight, I gave in to the dream of escape.
I didn't know it then, but the moment I stepped on the plane to India, I was flying away from an old lifestyle (minimal spending on holidays and leisure) and flying into the new one; I became part of the generation revealed by the Office of National Statistics today - one that copes with big debts by shelling out more to forget about them through flights abroad. My three-week Indian escape cost me £1,286.85, a figure which left me feeling in need of another break to get over it.
Holidays were not woven into the fabric of my childhood and neither have they, until recently, been part of adulthood. I suspect holidaying is something of a habit.
"Do you take many holidays?", a friend asked. "I don't take any holidays," I replied. One of the reasons I aim to begin cultivating a habit for holidays, though, is that you can end up burning yourself out like a pitiful candle without them. For many, mortgages shackle them to the country. In my case I'm part of the student loans generation; went to a university far from home, and will be paying it off for a long, long time.
Even earning under 13k a year, I am still in the top 20% of earners globally. Indeed, there are countless the world over who have never left the country of their birth nor would ever envisage doing so.
How different was it back in 1957? Is there anybody out there who experienced this generation? The change in lifestyle has been within the last 20 years. Did you grow up with holidays as part of the package of your life, as essential as food or water or clothes? I know one 16-year-old girl who has never left Salford, a 40-year-old woman who has never left Europe, and a 60-year-old man who has never left the UK, nor does he wish to do so.
As for me, the flashing red light of the bank balance and the hang-wringing signifies not that it's time to stop, for red is the new green for go - time for another holiday, I think...
