We all knew about the word ‘stay-cation’ previous to us having to cancel our fancy foreign holidays this year, but I’m getting super annoyed with people misusing the word ‘Stay-cation’. It does not mean a ‘holiday in the UK’, it means staying at home. In your own home. This is either for the purposes of day tripping, gardening, or getting around to those pesky DIY jobs you never have time for between skiing, a long weekend in New York and some all-inclusive summer package in Spain. Or doing nothing at all, in your own home.

It doesn’t mean a week in a lovely cottage in Dorset, or long weekend in Bath (unless you live in Dorset or Bath respectively).

One of the reasons that I’m so annoyed with this is that people are using stay-cation like its new thing, like it’s cute somehow or they’re holidaying with the ‘little people’ who can’t afford to fly off at over a grand a head in the school holidays to some 2 star resort in Benidorm every year.

Until I was 11, I had only holidayed in the UK. We went to Swanage one year, and pretty much every year after that we went to Exmouth. To the same little flat overlooking the docks, which weren’t nice docks, it was still working port that took shipments of scrap metal and some stinking animal feed. This was our family holiday. We packed up the estate car, and we went on holiday, to the flat that smelt of animal feed. HOLIDAY. Not a stay-cation. I blame the Americans in part for using the word ‘vacation’ in the first place which gave rise this now popular portmanteau.