I'm Ready to Become Part of the Brave New World of Women Leaving Their Loved Ones – and Traveling Alone

A couple of weeks ago, I received an message about a media tour I would never consider. It was overseas and it was about health, so it would have involved a lot of physical activity and early nights. Even if I liked those things, I wouldn't have been eager to spend a week with other people who liked them. But even as I was hitting delete, I started to think what that would actually be like: being somewhere different, 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 emerged they meant the other Zoe Williams, the one who is a physician and used to be a Gladiator, and is incredibly fit already, and yes, in retrospect, that should have been clear all along.

So, without meaning to and without going anywhere, I've arrived in the fastest-growing travel demographic: the female solo traveller, aged 45 to 60. One travel company reported that nearly half (46%) of their reservations are now people going alone, and 70% of those are females. They have households, they have hectic social lives, they have spouses, 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 trekking, cycling, paddling, all the things that partners 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 field 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 totally modern in every way, would get arrested before she’d go into a European restaurant on her own, and even though I mock her for this often, I must have had a vestige of it myself, to be this old before it even occurred to me to travel solo. Now I just have to go somewhere.