I'm Ready to Join the Brave New World of Females Leaving Their Loved Ones – and Traveling Solo

A couple of weeks back, I received an email about a media tour I would never consider. It was long haul and it was about health, so it would have involved a lot of physical activity and early nights. Even if I enjoyed those activities, I wouldn't have been desperate to spend a week with other people who enjoyed them. But even as I was hitting delete, I started to wonder what that would really be like: being somewhere new, without anyone to accommodate except myself, without anything to do except exactly what I wanted. Plainly, it would be incredible. So I said “yes” and it turned out they meant the different Zoe Williams, the one who is a physician and used to be a Gladiator, and is incredibly fit already, and yes, in hindsight, that should have been clear all along.

So, without meaning to and without going anywhere, I've entered the fastest-growing travel demographic: the woman traveling alone, aged 45 to 60. One tour operator stated that nearly half (46%) of their reservations 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 daring the travel, the more people are doing it alone. People are big into hiking, cycling, paddling, all the things that couples are unlikely to be in agreement on in their enthusiasm. If anyone is also tired of dragging teenagers to the world's marvels, 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 tactful to mention it.

The real mystery is why it’s taken so long to reach this point. My stepmother, who is completely modern in every way, would get arrested before she’d go into a Belgian restaurant on her own, and even though I tease her for this constantly, I must have had a trace of it myself, to be this old before it even occurred to me to travel solo. Now I just have to go somewhere.