If you're reading this, then there's still a chance. Turn back, on your way to the airport. Do you really, really want this?
This is what will happen. The airport will be horrible, obviously, its grim car parks and endless slogs and broken travolators and pointless check-in times all designed to make the going-away experience quite as hugely frustrating as possible, leaving you with an iron band pressing on your forehead and an utter absence of anticipation or fantasy, unless it's a fantasy involving airport architects and threshers. The flight indicator board thing will steadily flash, beside your flight details, the phrase 'wait in lounge' for precisely three-and-a-half hours and then suddenly flash 'gate closing', giving you slightly under three minutes to gather an entire family, bored and farflung and stuck in toilets, and make them run the seven-eighths of a mile to gate 86A, and no hint of romance along the way, not a sniff of aero fuel or a glimpse of proud high beckoning silver, just huge obstacles called 'improvement works' and a hundred greedy financial-services adverts and lots of signs telling you not to do something and the occasional rude toot from those electric buggies for the old and disabled and lazy; and if you smoke, or want to buy a book that hasn't been judged somehow too clever or interesting or good for the likes of you by the thundering illiterates who are the book-buyers for W.H. Smith, then you're in an even stickier pickle and shouldn't really have left home in the first place.
Then there's the plane, with that constant mild niggling background voice in your head that speaks of imminent tearing bloodied banshee fire-death hell, and the announcements that say you will be taking off 'momentarily', and the mincing stewards who get unaccountably snotty when you helpfully correct their English, and Other People's Children; and then you land, and it will be far too hot, and you will have forgotten something important, and someone will start crying, and the natives will quietly, all the time, despise you.
Why do so many of you bother taking August off? Faint criticism followed our Prime Minister to Barbados, but it was of the wrong sort. The problem is not simply that he's going to Barbados - though actually it is the wrong time of year for the Windies, as the posh still know, but he must be running out of other countries diplomatically willing to take him - nor, even, that he's borrowing Cliff Richard's villa. A bug-eyed right-wing Christian and a wife who's prone to bursting into song at inappropriate moments - no obvious suitability there then. No, the problem is that he's doing it at all, perpetuating the myth that we need to get out of Britain in August, and lie instead beside a Tuscan pool, fretting and phoning and wondering what we are, or rather what you are, missing.
What you're missing is this. Look outside, today, at the sunshine. Look at the quiet streets, and the greenery, and the very many pretty girls who have been woken by the sunlight. Look at the couple drinking chilled Chardonnay at a pavement café, and the couple sitting outside a country pub dandling their toes in the water; look at Britain at its quietest, and prettiest, and best, and explain to me again quite why we need to get out during August.
And if you're still on your way to the airport, then on second thoughts, and I'm sorry about this, but just you keep going and try to have a lovely time. We will.
