Staycations are the new things apparently, the new summer buzz, this year’s must have, this year’s black, (or is it white?), this year’s solution to fight the financial meltdown, to ease the pressure of economic mayhem, to pull down the smugly high trousers of the rising Euro and give it a good old bumming by staying at home instead of going abroad for our summer holiday, the gorgeous opportunity to celebrate the wonderfulness of Britain, the fabulousness of England, frig Spain and Italy and Croatia and you can shove the South of France with its smoky old men and lavender seas up your arse and knackers to Malta and its dusty villages and fresh fish when you can have the joy of London instead.

London.

Oh God, please no, not London, anywhere but London.

It appears I have just sicked up – partly a result of reading then typing out the word ‘staycation’ and partly while dining on the lower echelons of an egg, from the horror of staying here for any longer than I have to, for purposefully prolonging my imprisonment in a city that I feel ruthlessly chained to, a city that nurtures my indifference, that feeds my apathy, that fuels my frustrations, fills me with an overwhelming, overbearing glum gloom.

Why would I want to mope the chewing-gummed streets of a city that I so carefully and lovingly avoid, why would I want to traipse even more slowly behind malingering halfwits and deformed Americans? Why the beans on toast would I mingle with the dazed morons who ploddingly amble ever so innocently to Harrods, who clog up the West End streets like overweight simpletons, why would I want to savour the glazed euphoria of the cagouled troops at St Paul’s, the regulation masses eating Tesco sandwiches by Big Ben, why oh why would I spend a minute longer than legally necessary with the language school misfits giggling in the shadow of Eros, getting on the tube before I’ve got off, hearing the same piercing shriek as the trains come in and the trains come out, minute after minute, day after day, why the decrepit old balls would I heavy-heartedly watch the pavement artists morosely wish they were anywhere else than Leicester Square, stand in the cheap spittle under the London Eye, watch the lovers kiss by the Tate, the roller-skaters and lion-sitters so sweetly riding the gilded beasts of Trafalgar Square, why would I smile over a hot dog on a Saturday afternoon in Portobello, why doze warmly in the flitting Hyde Park sun, jump awake to the sound of geese in Green Park, why would I stand on Tower Bridge and watch the night go down over the gleaming city and wonder where to go tomorrow and the day after and the day after that?

I’d better not, just in case I enjoyed myself.